September 2014
For those who have not yet caught
up with it, in the academic world the phrase “trigger warning” means alerting
students to books that might “trigger” deleterious emotional effects. Should a
Jewish student be asked to read “Oliver Twist” with its anti-Semitic caricature
of Fagin, let alone “The Merchant of Venice,” whose central figure is the Jewish
usurer Shylock? Should African-American students be required to read
“Huckleberry Finn,” with its generous use of the “n-word,” or “Heart of
Darkness,” which equates the Congo with the end of rational civilization?
Should students who are ardent
pacifists be made to read about warfare in Tolstoy and Stendhal, or for that
matter the Iliad? As for gay and lesbian students, or students who have suffered
sexual abuse, or those who have a physical handicap . . . one could go on.
Pointing out the potentially
damaging effects of books began, like so much these days, on the Internet, where
intellectual Samaritans began listing such emotionally troublesome books on
their blogs. Before long it was picked up by the academy. At the University of
California at Santa Barbara, the student government suggested that all course
syllabi contain trigger warnings. At Oberlin College, the Office of Equity
Concerns advised professors to steer
clear of works that might be interpreted as sexist or racist or as vaunting
violence.
Movies have of course long been
rated and required to note such items as Adult Language, Violence,
Nudity—ratings that are themselves a form of trigger warning. Why not books,
even great classic books? The short answer is that doing so insults the
intelligence of those supposedly serious enough to attend college by suggesting
they must not be asked to read anything that fails to comport with their own
beliefs or takes full account of their troubled past experiences.
Trigger
warnings logically
follow from
the recent
history of American academic life. This is a history in which demographic
diversity has triumphed over intellectual standards and the display of virtue
over the search for truth. So much of this history begins in good intentions and
ends in the tyranny of conformity.
Sometime in the 1950s, American
universities determined to acquire students from less populous parts of the
country to give their institutions the feeling of geographical diversity. In the
1960s, after the great moral victories of the civil-rights movement, the next
obvious step was racial preferences, which allowed special concessions to admit
African-American students. In conjunction with this, black professors were felt
to be needed to teach these students and, some said, serve as role models.
Before long the minority of women among the professoriate was noted. This, too,
would soon be amended. “Harvard,” I remember hearing around this time, “is
looking for a good feminist.”
All this, most reasonable people
would concur, was fair enough. Then things took a radical twist. Suddenly women,
African-Americans, and (later) gay and lesbian professors began teaching, in
effect, themselves. No serious university could do business without an
African-American Studies Department. Many female professors created and found an
academic home in something called Gender Studies, which turned out to be chiefly
about the suppression of women, just as African-American Studies was chiefly
about the historical and contemporary maltreatment of blacks.
Something called Queer Studies
came next, with gays and lesbians instructing interested students in the
oppression of homosexuals.
Over time, the themes of gender,
class and race were insinuated into the softer social sciences and much of the
humanities. They have established a reign of quiet academic terror, and that has
made the university a very touchy place indeed.
Meanwhile many of those students
who in the late 1960s arose in protest have themselves come to prominence and
even to eminence as professors in their 60s and early 70s. Having fought in
their youth against what they thought the professorial old-boy network, they now
find themselves old boys. Unable to discover a way to replace the presumably
unjust society that they once sought to topple, they currently tend to stand
aside when students and younger professors cavort in bumptious protest, lest
they themselves be thought, God forfend, part of the problem.
University presidents and their
increasingly large army of administrators have by now a 50-year tradition of
cowardice. They do not clamp down when students reject the visits on their
campuses of such courageous or accomplished women as Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Christine
Lagarde or Condoleezza Rice because their views are not perfectly congruent with
the students’ own jejune beliefs. When students and younger faculty line up
behind the morally obtuse anti-Israel BDS (Boycott, Divest, Sanction) movement,
wiser heads do not prevail, for the good reason that there are no wiser heads.
The inmates, fair to say, are running the joint.
The trigger warning is another
passage in the unfinished symphony of political correctness. If the universities
do not come out against attacks on freedom of speech, why should they oppose the
censorship implicit in trigger warnings? The main point of these warnings, as
with all political correctness, is to protect the minority of the weak, the
vulnerable, the disheartened or the formerly discriminated against, no matter
what the price in civility, scholarly integrity and political sanity. Do they
truly require such protection, even at the price of genuine education?
Nearly 200 years ago Alexis de
Tocqueville, in his book on American democracy, feared the mob of the majority.
In the American university today that mob looks positively pusillanimous next to
the mob of the minority.
Mr. Epstein’s latest book is “A Literary Education and Other Essays,” published this week by Axios Press.
Wall Street Journal, May 27, 2014.
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