No trigger warnings in my class: Why you won’t find them on my syllabi

Every semester on the first day of my classes, I explain to students that at some point during the semester, the material that we cover will fundamentally challenge their thinking in some area that they hold dear, particularly their beliefs about race, gender and sexuality. Therefore the growing national conversation, buttressed by demands from students, that college professors place trigger warnings on their syllabi to alert students to uncomfortable and traumatic material gives me great concern. While I care about my own academic freedom and the ways that trigger warnings impede my ability to teach course materials in the ways I deem most appropriate, I care far more about educating students who can entertain a range of competing views, wade through those beliefs, and come out on the other side with clarity and the capacity to articulate their position. I have had colleagues at institutions from around the country discuss the uproar they get from students of certain religious backgrounds when they are asked to engage with sexually explicit material in the classroom. In graduate school one of my professors told us a story about students who started bringing the Bible to her women’s and gender studies class whenever the class talked about homosexuality.