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| Warning my students about a lecture on assault does not make them snowflakes | Warning my students about a lecture on assault does not make them snowflakes |
| (12 days later) | |
| This term I gave a lecture about how sexual assault is portrayed in drama. Over the hour, my students and I considered extracts from Sarah Kane’s 1995 play Blasted and William Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus, and in particular how traumatic experiences can be treated in art and in criticism in more or less ridiculous, comic, or frivolous ways. | This term I gave a lecture about how sexual assault is portrayed in drama. Over the hour, my students and I considered extracts from Sarah Kane’s 1995 play Blasted and William Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus, and in particular how traumatic experiences can be treated in art and in criticism in more or less ridiculous, comic, or frivolous ways. |
| In the lecture timetable sent to students before term starts, I signalled that the way this discussion was conducted might be particularly difficult for those who had personally encountered abuse or assault. Very few lectures offered to students by my faculty are accompanied by such trigger warnings, but I attached mine in the knowledge that I’d be discussing these issues extensively, and that I’d be considering how the playwrights in question demean their victims by theatrical means. | In the lecture timetable sent to students before term starts, I signalled that the way this discussion was conducted might be particularly difficult for those who had personally encountered abuse or assault. Very few lectures offered to students by my faculty are accompanied by such trigger warnings, but I attached mine in the knowledge that I’d be discussing these issues extensively, and that I’d be considering how the playwrights in question demean their victims by theatrical means. |
| I did this last year, too, but this time round the Telegraph, the BBC, the Guardian and others yarked up a story with headlines such as “Cambridge students warned Shakespeare plays may distress them” and “Cambridge Uni students get Shakespeare trigger warnings”. By the time the Independent ran it, Kane wasn’t mentioned any more; soon enough, opinion columnists were failing to mention either the focus on Kane or the extended examination of sexual assault. In the Observer, David Mitchell why-oh-whyed about students “being protected from the knowledge of, among other things, what one of Shakespeare’s plays is about, in case it upsets them”. | I did this last year, too, but this time round the Telegraph, the BBC, the Guardian and others yarked up a story with headlines such as “Cambridge students warned Shakespeare plays may distress them” and “Cambridge Uni students get Shakespeare trigger warnings”. By the time the Independent ran it, Kane wasn’t mentioned any more; soon enough, opinion columnists were failing to mention either the focus on Kane or the extended examination of sexual assault. In the Observer, David Mitchell why-oh-whyed about students “being protected from the knowledge of, among other things, what one of Shakespeare’s plays is about, in case it upsets them”. |
| In this case I was not being censored and I was not censoring myself | In this case I was not being censored and I was not censoring myself |
| Terrible things happen to people: across my career I have met students who have told me about recently losing family members or friends; students who have been sexually assaulted; students who have attempted suicide. There are many others, I’m sure, who are experiencing trauma silently, invisibly, and possibly alone. When I put a trigger warning alongside this lecture, it was not because Titus Andronicus is a bit gory. I was allowing for the fact that, hypothetically, somebody present might otherwise find themselves in a room where the circumstances of their recent abuse would be forensically and extensively discussed as a matter of literary interest. | Terrible things happen to people: across my career I have met students who have told me about recently losing family members or friends; students who have been sexually assaulted; students who have attempted suicide. There are many others, I’m sure, who are experiencing trauma silently, invisibly, and possibly alone. When I put a trigger warning alongside this lecture, it was not because Titus Andronicus is a bit gory. I was allowing for the fact that, hypothetically, somebody present might otherwise find themselves in a room where the circumstances of their recent abuse would be forensically and extensively discussed as a matter of literary interest. |
| We might wonder why the later write-ups of the lecture dropped all mention of its focus on sexual assault. Is it because it’s actually perfectly reasonable to alert recent victims of abuse and assault that those subjects will be discussed for an hour in a room not easy to get out of – discussed carefully, but perhaps also in unhelpful tones of critical detachment? | We might wonder why the later write-ups of the lecture dropped all mention of its focus on sexual assault. Is it because it’s actually perfectly reasonable to alert recent victims of abuse and assault that those subjects will be discussed for an hour in a room not easy to get out of – discussed carefully, but perhaps also in unhelpful tones of critical detachment? |
| The Daily Mail told its readers “trigger warnings grew out of a demand by the student unions to create a ‘safe space’ on campuses where students can study without feeling disturbed”. They concluded “many believe this has led to censorship”. But trigger warnings are nothing to do with censorship; they’re a basic courtesy. In this case I was not being censored and I was not censoring myself. The trigger warning was enabling me to talk about challenging issues; it was an announcement that I was going to talk about them, at length, from a literary-critical angle. | The Daily Mail told its readers “trigger warnings grew out of a demand by the student unions to create a ‘safe space’ on campuses where students can study without feeling disturbed”. They concluded “many believe this has led to censorship”. But trigger warnings are nothing to do with censorship; they’re a basic courtesy. In this case I was not being censored and I was not censoring myself. The trigger warning was enabling me to talk about challenging issues; it was an announcement that I was going to talk about them, at length, from a literary-critical angle. |
| It’s unlikely that anything I say will persuade the Daily Mail that the sardonic headline “Alas, poor snowflakes!” doesn’t really fit the facts of the story. But the basic errors in how this story has been reported misrepresent my students and – in my view – they misunderstand what it is to be a student of literature. | It’s unlikely that anything I say will persuade the Daily Mail that the sardonic headline “Alas, poor snowflakes!” doesn’t really fit the facts of the story. But the basic errors in how this story has been reported misrepresent my students and – in my view – they misunderstand what it is to be a student of literature. |
| The Labour MP Helen Jones, for example, tweeted, “I’m very worried if Cambridge are admitting people who don’t know that Shakespeare can be gory”; not worried enough to find out more about what was in the lectures, but pretty firm in her belief that Cambridge admissions interviews ought simply to test candidates on what is in different books. Trawl through the comments on these stories and Jones’s view is widespread: people believe that lectures simply describe a book’s content. But I didn’t intend to spend an hour telling the students that these plays contained reference to sexual assault: the lecture discussed how sexual assault was depicted, and how those depictions come to be trivialised or even laughed at in reception. | The Labour MP Helen Jones, for example, tweeted, “I’m very worried if Cambridge are admitting people who don’t know that Shakespeare can be gory”; not worried enough to find out more about what was in the lectures, but pretty firm in her belief that Cambridge admissions interviews ought simply to test candidates on what is in different books. Trawl through the comments on these stories and Jones’s view is widespread: people believe that lectures simply describe a book’s content. But I didn’t intend to spend an hour telling the students that these plays contained reference to sexual assault: the lecture discussed how sexual assault was depicted, and how those depictions come to be trivialised or even laughed at in reception. |
| Literary criticism is a discipline that can train students to suspend emotional response and to apply analytical skills to that response to better understand it. But it bears stressing again: these trigger warnings are not used as a safeguard against the merely “difficult”, the “upsetting”, or the “uncomfortable” (to borrow some of the belittling terms favoured in the reports I’ve read). Being traumatised is not the same as being mildly discomfited. And the students I’ve encountered in my career who have been unable to participate fully in their study because of traumatic experiences have been profoundly frustrated that this is the case. | Literary criticism is a discipline that can train students to suspend emotional response and to apply analytical skills to that response to better understand it. But it bears stressing again: these trigger warnings are not used as a safeguard against the merely “difficult”, the “upsetting”, or the “uncomfortable” (to borrow some of the belittling terms favoured in the reports I’ve read). Being traumatised is not the same as being mildly discomfited. And the students I’ve encountered in my career who have been unable to participate fully in their study because of traumatic experiences have been profoundly frustrated that this is the case. |
| Furthermore, as several of my students have since pointed out, a warning like this one might also allow a victim of trauma to prepare themselves for the discussion, rather than being abruptly and unexpectedly confronted with it. What is the justification for forcing that shock upon a student? | Furthermore, as several of my students have since pointed out, a warning like this one might also allow a victim of trauma to prepare themselves for the discussion, rather than being abruptly and unexpectedly confronted with it. What is the justification for forcing that shock upon a student? |
| If the #metoo movement is still prominent in your thoughts, then you might reflect that it wouldn’t be acceptable for me to stand behind a lectern and to opine that rape, sexual assault and sexual molestation are to be treated in the abstract simply whenever I decide. Is it any more acceptable for journalists to imply that a victim of assault is weak because they may be unable to sit through an hour in which I consider the treatments of assault as literary enterprises? And is it really acceptable for those who chortle at the notion of trigger warnings to tell victims of assault and abuse that they are “snowflakes”? | If the #metoo movement is still prominent in your thoughts, then you might reflect that it wouldn’t be acceptable for me to stand behind a lectern and to opine that rape, sexual assault and sexual molestation are to be treated in the abstract simply whenever I decide. Is it any more acceptable for journalists to imply that a victim of assault is weak because they may be unable to sit through an hour in which I consider the treatments of assault as literary enterprises? And is it really acceptable for those who chortle at the notion of trigger warnings to tell victims of assault and abuse that they are “snowflakes”? |
| Many reports have cited the same tired vox pops, presenting them as the overwhelming consensus of academia. Prominent among them was Dennis Hayes, professor of education at Derby University, who reckoned that “once you get a few trigger warnings, lecturers will stop presenting anything controversial. Gradually, there is no critical discussion.” I can speak for myself – and, I think, many other academics – when I say I feel perfectly able to issue trigger warnings and also to continue discussing “anything controversial”. And, contrary to Hayes, I do not believe that “critical discussion” has to happen at the expense of humane conversation. | Many reports have cited the same tired vox pops, presenting them as the overwhelming consensus of academia. Prominent among them was Dennis Hayes, professor of education at Derby University, who reckoned that “once you get a few trigger warnings, lecturers will stop presenting anything controversial. Gradually, there is no critical discussion.” I can speak for myself – and, I think, many other academics – when I say I feel perfectly able to issue trigger warnings and also to continue discussing “anything controversial”. And, contrary to Hayes, I do not believe that “critical discussion” has to happen at the expense of humane conversation. |
| • Ian Burrows is a teaching associate in the faculty of English at the University of Cambridge | • Ian Burrows is a teaching associate in the faculty of English at the University of Cambridge |