Also, Joseph Fiennes is far too good-looking to play the Commander, as originally written, which isn’t a good sign of a production faithful to the message of the book. I’m going to go out on on a limb here and say that titillation will play a fairly outsized role in a story where this originally had no part.

1. Why don’t these people have feet? Did they already survive one unfortunate train encounter?

Personally, I think there are certain images within the canon that should probably carry trigger warnings (i.e. prof says “this is very graphic” before flipping the slide or whatever). For example, there’s a lot of Surrealist and Dada art that is purposefully created to be disturbing, and there are some surprisingly…

“The function of trigger warnings, used properly, is to let people know that material will require some extra emotional effort.”

I assign this sort of thing at a large state university for several reasons: students are incredibly unprepared and have little time for coursework on top of their several jobs and their other responsibilities. In large courses, with no TA but still with the requirement that the class be ‘writing intensive,’ this sort…

How about don’t clip your nails on a subway or you might lose a fucking finger.

Any evaluation that comments on a professor’s appearance (or vocal fry) should be immediately shredded and count towards nothing. That’s just absurd.

Being an older student you are very possibly overestimating how well prepared your fellow classmates are in performing research. I’ve taught third year coureses at a very good university (I’m just finishin my PhD in the humanities), and I also always taught research methods in those, including the stages of…

Have you ever seen any evidence that being surprsed by reminders of your trauma fixes it either? I think moodipoo’s post diferentiating between the online currating, which can be almost absolute, and real life is actually pretty spot on and important. If your idea of trigger warning is based entirely on the context of…

In an academic setting you might have to read things that fundamentally upset you. Someone pursing a degree in modern literature can just choose to avoid the class on Lolita, but someone specializing in Nabokov can’t. I did classics in undergrad, and our professors did give us summaries on the syllabus that included…

I think you’ve gotten at the fundamental tension here, in that proponents of trigger warnings view it as the latter and opponents the former and so often you have the two sides talking past each other rather than with each other.

For what it’s worth, I personally have found warnings to be a great resource that allow…

My senior year in high school we all took an American politics and government class. I really liked the class and was that obnoxious kid that would get involved in every discussion. One of the assigned readings was a book which included stories from the lives of people on various kinds of welfare and one of those…

Exactly. As far as my anecdotal experience, students just want the latter, but it seems many professors believe that students expect the former.

Empathetic professors have always given “trigger warnings” in just the way you’re describing. I don’t like the idea that certain “triggers” have been formalized: Sexual assault, eating disorder, suicide... Ironically, these formal warnings have the effect of prescribing a limited set of experiences of discomfort as…

Some evaluations are just ridiculously poorly written too. I actually think that my departments’ are pretty good, and pretty fair. But I recently took another instructor’s class, for fun, and while I know the students loved both him and the class, I worry about his evaluations just because of the way they were…

As a tenure-track faculty member, fitting marriage and pregnancy and children into my career has been the hardest part of realizing I have accidentally become an academic (shame me all you want, but I always wanted to work for a while and then be a stay-at-home mom until I got sucked into this...and now I am not sure…

And I don’t think it’s that the students do not want to participate in the class, they just don’t want to be caught off guard, possibly causing a panic attack while trying to do homework. A reasonable request, I think.

I saw someone I went to high school with complaining on FB once because a professor wouldn’t give him the answers to the homework. He said he should have them since he was “a paying customer who wants good grades.” It’s ridiculous.

You likely have no idea that contingent faculty tend to be women, while tenured positions tend to be men, or that academia has a way of turning pregnancy into a career-ending disability, of forcing women into taking on more service-related duties, of punishing them for speaking their minds. You are likely unaware that…

As a former adjunct professor, I rolled my eyes pretty hard the first time I heard about the stories about students demanding trigger warnings to protect their fragile feelings.