University of Chicago: ‘We Do Not Support So-Called Trigger Warnings’

One of those skills is the ability to think critically about a variety of topics. My assumption is that University of Chicago believes that in order to develop those critical thinking skills, it is a REQUIREMENT to learn an environment with a free and open exchange of ideas.

Students that want the credential BUT they do not want to complete one of the requirements of that credential should reconsider whether the credential is right for them or perhaps find another university.

To use your grocery store/gallon of milk analogy, a more accurate version would be if I went to a grocery store and asked for a gallon of milk, but demanded that it be zero calories and made from tomatoes. The store owner would tell the customer that they can buy tomato juice or water, but there is nothing labeled as MILK which meets their requirements.

> It'd be like if grocery stores started pretending their purpose was to provide an area for debate, and every time you wanted to get a gallon of milk you had to both pay for it and argue with the cashier about politics for 5 minutes. You don't want to do that? What, are you afraid of being exposed to new ideas?

You have this precisely backwards. Grocery stores are designed and advertised as being for groceries: they're not debate areas that people decided to start using to pick up milk. A more relevant analogy would be people going into a church just to rest their legs in a pretty building, and then complaining about the guy droning on about God. We would quite clearly place the blame in that case on the people expecting the church to accommodate their ideal of "a pretty building to sit down in", in contradiction to the original and stated goals of the church.

This is most certainly not the case at the University of Chicago. If you want a degree, even a prestigious one, there are far easier options (even in Chicago... See that school in Evanston ;)

Students choose the U of C because they want to be challenged by ideas, they want to spend four miserable years pummeling their brains with the totality of human endeavor, at 1000 pages per week, lest they never have such chance again in their lives.

The degree itself matters to me very little, but the way that school changed my life will stay with me always.

    >The problem with this is that's not why most people go to universities. The top reason is probably credentials for employment

There's more to any given job, or any given career path, than the hard skills required for it. Arguably much more.

I realize we can quickly slip down the rabbit hole of debating what the primary purpose of a college education is supposed to be. I'd rather not do so. Even if we believe that the primary purpose is job preparation, we should acknowledge that developing critical thinking skills serves that purpose well.

Then we could save Universities for art and intellectual pursuits, spending an increasing amount of time there as our children grow up and eventually leave the house. As a dad of young children right now I feel a tinge of melancholy as I realize that in not too many years my children will move on and my life will become much quieter. How great would it be if instead I could look forward to that time when I'm able to engage with others who are at a similar stage in life for an indefinite period of challenging and rewarding study? People who have had enough life experience to actually have something to share and some real differing opinions and experiences? People who are not in a hurry to get a degree and get on with life? That seems to me to be much closer to the ideal of what we would like for a University to be.

The real issue here is people using "safe spaces" and "triggers" and "microaggressions" and what have you to block people from making the choices they want to make. Like you, they seem to think that someone speaking about something they disagree with is about them. It isn't.

All you have to do is be tolerant, and mind your own business like any other adult.

If someone else wants to buy tomato juice, why should you care?

Go to any public university in the South, and you can hear essentially the same sentiment in your post, coming from young conservative white kids who don't want to question the way they were brought up or learn about other cultures, gay rights, etc.

I think the idea of a university is that it's good for the intellectual development of both the conservative southern kids and the trigger warning kids if they occasionally have to struggle with new ideas outside their comfort zone.

It is a clever metaphore, but I don't think degrees are like gallons of milk at all. It is more like Louis Vuitton bags.

There are USD$600 LV bags, and there are others that cost twice or even 3 times as much. But, as many people that would love to snatch a USD$100 bag as there might be, LV cannot sell to them; if they did, all the > USD$1k customers would never buy LV again. Then the < USD$1k customers would begin to ask why they cannot have a 50% discount in the first place. And before long, LV would be selling at Walmart, competing with the (much more experienced) other players in the $20-$30 bag market.

Degrees are the same. Lots of people who only want a job want those. But the people who already have one like to believe that their degree says something about them; among other things, that they have the ability to dispasionately discuss subjects they find personally offensive. Every successful university has to stay in speaking terms with their alumni, if not for no other reason than to have then send their kids to the same university when the time comes.

At the end of day, University of Chicago is branding itself as "the place to study if you are an actual adult". Sometimes you want to sell regular milk, but sometimes you want to sell organic, grass-fed, free-range milk. And it is a good thing to have both options available.

Unfortunately, the combination of these two things makes it nearly impossible to be a climate-scientist who disagrees with the herd. Even if you could overcome the massive cultural hurdle, you have society and the government to deal with as well.

Which makes me skeptical, but I still think that it's safest to heed the precautionary principle.

The other day I read an article where the headline said "Scientists explain why despite global warming, there is more ice in the antarctic." Then in the text it said "Scientists can't explain it."

So don't just think that things are conclusive because you've been reading articles. The "warmest july on record" isn't really all that impressive to me considering the record isn't that deep when it comes to the age of the earth.

Sure it was. In the 1960s and 70s, for example, when Universities were a hotbed of free speech and civil liberty activism:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Speech_Movement

Take, for example, the Yale Halloween controversy, where supporters of this ideal fought hard to protect white male students from the idea that their costumes were mocking others because it might make them uncomfortable wearing them, and that violated their free speech somehow.

Or take the conservative activist who was so outraged at a left-wing poem in a newsletter that he barged into the office of a professor involved with it, demanding to know who "approved" the offending article and refusing to leave, and how groups like FIRE and all the other vocal supporters of the free end open exchange of ideas insisted his actions were a valent stand for the freedom of student speech.

DePaul claimed they blocked Shapiro from speaking due to "security concerns"[0]. In particular, students in favor of safe spaces and trigger warnings threatened to riot, block the doors, and prevent student access to the event. DePaul capitulated to this bullying by banning Shapiro.

Related: California State University-Los Angeles planned on hosting Shapiro to speak, but demanded[1] the student group which invited him to pay $600 to the university in security fees. When the student group refused, the university blocked his speech.

I'm not aware of this happening to speakers holding majority political viewpoint; it affects the minority viewpoints primarily. Frame it in terms of race: imagine a modern campus saying, "We allow blacks to speak, but only if they pay hundreds of dollars to provide security against the white riots that will inevitably arise."

[0]: http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2016/aug/1/ben-shapiro-b...

[1]: http://www.thecollegefix.com/post/26367/

Should creationist students lobby to remove the teaching of evolution from the curriculum? I understand that it's not an identical situation, but the general point is that students are putting a certain level of trust in the university to educate them, and having a line-item veto on the manner that that's done leads to insanity if you actually apply it equitably. If students knew exactly what they needed to learn, going to college would be largely irrelevant.

This is really frustrating for someone with a genuine allergy because you feel drowned out by all the "fake" allergies that are just preferences and as a result sometimes people take allergies less seriously because they assume your "allergy" is just a preference, or just generally take it less seriously. For example, if someone asks you if something contains gluten, knowing nothing else, what would you estimate are the chances they are actually seriously allergic to it? These days, with the popularity of avoiding gluten in the west, maybe below 50%. This is a scary situation for anyone with a genuine allergy.

I'm sure it's just as frustrating for people with genuine PTSD or other situations where real mental health trauma could occur, to be drowned out and lumped in with all these folks who merely experience mild discomfort at discussing a topic.

So, a plea -- if you don't genuinely suffer from a serious physical or mental health response to a situation, but merely mild discomfort, be honest and just say you don't like something. You're making it worse for people with genuine problems when you lie and call it a genuine medical problem.

If you're not sure, a good rule of thumb is if you haven't been to or plan to soon go to a doctor (or really want to, but can't for some reason eg financial) to discuss the problem, it must not be disturbing your life enough to count as a real malady.

Right, but I'd assume this is probably done in small increments or doses? A person who's finding themselves exposed to said triggers may not be able to control how much of it they get in certain situations, which could arguably leave them off worse after the event.

Uncontrolled exposure is more likely to worsen the anxiety than extinguish it.

I mean, are you really arguing that the clinical approach to trauma is to surprise the patient with the topic in the middle of important everyday tasks?

Obviously, trigger warning provide a useful tool for people to manage their own exposure to these panic attacks. If this was not the case then no-one would ever suffer from PTSD as it would be instantly self-healing!

Be careful on that slippery slope!

I know what all of these things mean, and I didn't learn any of them from college, I learned them from reading blog posts and things online.

If you're instead trying to show which American political tribe you belong to, the concerns you mention become very important.

That's one way it's relevant, to answer your first sentence. The fact that Yale fosters this family-esque relationship with peers, faculty, and deans is one of the contributing factors to extremely emotional response of the protesters, right or wrong. This fact was glossed over in almost all media reportings.

I agree it is, but right now it's very difficult to have the discussions necessary to draw those lines—supporters of trigger warnings only want to discuss the cases where they're clearly justified (fireworks & veterans) and pretend all uses are similarly valid, and critics of trigger warnings only want to discuss the cases where they're clearly not (slimy things), and pretend that all uses are similarly invalid. Determining where the lines should be drawn will be a long, complicated, painful discussion, but currently there's no way to have that conversation. If your opinion is somewhere in the middle, most internet commentators will lump you into the all-for or all-against group.

Since blood leads, this is, in my personal estimation, done primarily to increase immediate viewer count, not avoid - and thus retain in the more distant future - discomfiting sensitive current viewers.

Yes, but students shouldn't expect that warning before a class on horror films. If you're unable to see graphic imagery, you should drop the class.

Similarly, students shouldn't expect to be warned about a discussion of slavery in a course about the American civil war. And you really shouldn't be able to get a degree in American history if you're unable to study the civil war.

Which is, in turn, why many people don't take these things seriously. Of course, perhaps there is a justification for "trigger warnings" and "safe spaces" in colleges, but the issue of whether those 1) belong in the classroom as opposed to elsewhere on campus, and 2) should be a feature of colleges at all, is completely derailed by things like this.

Maybe you should try having more empathy for oppressed groups and individuals rather than writing off anything you can't immediately connect to your own experience as infantile.

I'd argue we pretty much already have this. Most people are aware of when a delicate topic is delicate and will treat it as such or avoid it, depending on the context. Trigger warnings seem to be a hammer in search of a nail, or more likely to me, something that was perhaps well intentioned at one point that is now just a means of attention seeking.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nirvana_fallacy

One of the most effective ways of learning is to hear and consider ideas opposed to the ones you currently hold. But these kinds of things (trigger warnings and safe spaces) act to prevent this. It inhibits learning. Sheltering people's preconceptions is the perfect way to prevent them from learning to think independently, which is opposite to the reason for going to school. Or at least, used to be.

Second, what the hell kind of professor shows porn to their class!? The warning required in that case is that the professor is unfit to teach, and/or the course offered is unworthy of any curriculum. I'm not a prude, and I can imagine perhaps some sort of graduate criminal psychology class where that might be justifiable, but it seems some sort of written description would do just fine even then.

I'm in close contact with a lot of social justice groups, specifically ones based out of UC Berkeley. It's not super widespread, but there are absolutely individuals who abuse the concept of triggers as a way to give themselves pretext to be cruel to others, to control conversations, or just as something to get righteously indignified about.

This is an issue with the individuals involved and not triggers per se, but just as with other social technologies it's definitely possible to abuse triggers.

That said, I do hear some vitriolic defenses of them as well.

Moral of the story: Don't trust anything you read on the internet, I guess.

The obvious conclusion there is that we need to work with doctors and patients to understand their needs better, not "this is weird, so no point in trying."

> Trying to accommodate every single mental handicap in society is futile and expensive.

This is exactly the slippery-slope argument I was talking about. Reasonable accommodations.

But, in his ten weeks as a leader of the college, Master Christakis has not fostered this sense of community. He seems to lack the ability, quite frankly, to put aside his opinions long enough to listen to the very real hurt that the community feels. He doesn’t get it. And I don’t want to debate. I want to talk about my pain (emphasis added)." [0]

From one of the Yale protestors demanding the termination of a professor who wrote an email questioning the need to regulate student Halloween costumes, and her husband for standing by her. FWIW, the student activists at UChicago plastered their Facebook walls with expressions of solidarity with these protestors.

[0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2015/11/09/...

It's not like people were so much stronger back then that no women complained about the normalization of sexual assault, it's that those that did were forcibly silenced. It's not that mental health issues didn't exist, they were just quickly swept under the rug.

"there was a time when a man kept his bullshit to himself"

Your right to "speech" only applies to the public spaces of the State. So stop trying to expand free speech to mean "freedom to scream at people whenever you want."

The given student association has a say in who it allows as members and as guests in to their private spaces. This has nothing to do with professors deciding to analyze the work of the Marquis de Sade (sp?). It's more about saying these associations have legal autonomy from the university itself when it comes to governing their private spaces no different than private associations being autonomous from the government in managing their private spaces as well.

"Let me reiterate that. Because trigger warnings and safe spaces are just code names for censorship, they cannot exist at the same time as a proper education, and the students that want to learn should not be punished by the stupidity of the students who only demand censorship (safe spaces and trigger warnings)."

Let me break this down here. When safe spaces are invoked they are only reasonably invoked in private spaces of student associations. This excludes class rooms of any given course on campus. So if the local LGBT students association refuse membership to some alt-right/nrx students or not to attend an open conference or just to simply not interact with specific individuals as a general rule there's no censorship in the sense of banning people from university speaking. You just happen not be free to speak in one private space independent of school functions. It's really no different than a club setting. To argue that this is censorship dilutes the meaning and impact of censorship throughout history and demands that private spaces become public spaces when case law on this matter in the United States is effectively settled (i.e. you have no right to a venue of your choice so long as that venue is private).

As for trigger warnings, this is not censorship, as I've had actual course descriptions that noted there were topics such as incest in the literature discussed and analyzed. Putting such notes in the course description effectively defines it as a trigger warning. No one is stopping the professor because in the vast majority of cases the professor was the one who wrote the description at least my university. And this wasn't some liberal bastion, either. It just happened the professor in question was sensible enough to give an accurate description of the course. Now, if you think trigger warnings are bad because people avoid courses that might cause them major emotional stress (like said talking about the topic of incest in relation to a work of fiction) then you need to show me how that violates the free speech of a professor. Don't give me this high minded bunk about "but you're there to be challenged." Because at the heart of the matter that's up to the student to take a course. If a student refuses to take a course that's not censorship that's a student refusing to take a course. It would be one thing to say that a professor should be forced by administrators to not cover the literature in question or to not offer the course, that is censorship but anything else you try to shoe horn in as censorship has none of the sufficient conditions to satisfy the definition in the most general sense.

In short, private spaces being handled by private organizations as such have the legal authority to refuse to offer their spaces as venues to anyone and for any purpose. That is the law and you can't debate it either way. Nor are trigger warnings (really they're just course descriptions) censorship since the course isn't being halted by the mere existence of them in their course descriptions in the course catalog. Nor is the absence of students who refuse to partake in courses they find troubling censorship as the professor can continue to offer the course. If they don't meet the required minimum to maintain the course that's just a tough break there. I've had courses cancelled all the time for similar reasons on far blander topics of circuitry and logic. So I'm not going to entertain nonsensical and vague definitions of censorship as such. Either produce actual evidence of what I've listed as censorship or admit you're incorrect on the matter.

Trigger warnings aren't about bending to the every whim of everyone you encounter. They're about labeling material ahead of time so that people can make a more informed decision about when and how they expose themselves to it. Nothing about this requires changing educational material; it would just mean putting some notice in the class listings and syllabus about what potentially uncomfortable topics are going to be covered in detail.