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Cornell University Rejects Students’ Call For Trigger Warnings

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Administrators at Cornell University have rejected a student resolution calling for the university to require faculty to provide trigger warnings about classroom content that students may consider “traumatic.”

Resolution SA 31 , passed by the Student Assembley on March 23, urged the university to require faculty to provide advance notice to students about traumatic content that could be presented in class “including but not limited to: sexual assault, domestic violence, self harm, suicide, child abuse, racial hate crimes, transphobic violence, homophobic harassment, xenophobia”

The resolution also called for students who choose to opt-out of exposure to triggering content to not be penalized, “contingent on their responsibility to make up any missed content.”

This week the university responded. “We cannot accept this resolution, as the actions it recommends would infringe on our core commitment to academic freedom and freedom of inquiry, and are at odds with the goals of a Cornell education,” wrote Cornell President Martha Pollack and Provost Michael Kotlikoff.

In their response , Pollack and Kotlikoff added, “such a policy would violate our faculty’s fundamental right to determine what and how to teach, preventing them from adding, throughout the semester, any content that any student might find upsetting. It would have a chilling effect on faculty, who would naturally fear censure lest they bring a discussion spontaneously into new and challenging territory, or fail to accurately anticipate students’ reaction to a topic or idea.”

The administrators also refused to require that students choosing to opt out of exposure to what they viewed as triggering content would not be penalized.

“Learning to engage with difficult and challenging ideas is a core part of a university education: essential to our students’ intellectual growth, and to their future ability to lead and thrive in a diverse society. As such, permitting our students to opt out of all such encounters, across any course or topic, would have a deleterious impact both on the education of the individual student, and on the academic distinction of a Cornell degree,” they wrote.

The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) had written Cornell officials, urging them to turn down the Student Assembly's resolution. "Were Cornell to impose such a policy, it would not only violate the university’s clear commitments to open inquiry, but also constitute a gross infringement of faculty members’ academic freedom to discuss pedagogically relevant material in class in the manner of their choosing," its letter read in part.

In a nod to student concerns about the impact that emotionally evocative material might have on individuals, Pollack and Kotlikoff acknowledged that “common courtesy would suggest that in some cases faculty may wish to provide notice, whether via the course syllabus or in the classroom, when they will be addressing topics that some may find challenging or painful.”

The effectiveness of trigger warnings has been evaluated in recent research, which tends to suggest that they are either ineffective or counterproductive.

A research team at the University of Waikato, (New Zealand) published a large-scale study that examined whether trigger warnings work as intended – reducing distress for people later exposed to upsetting information – or misfire – priming anxiety in individuals who receive the warnings.

The researchers conducted six experiments involving 1,394 subjects, some of whom were college students and others who were online participants. Some subjects were given a message prior to the material they were about to see. An example: “TRIGGER WARNING: The following video may contain graphic footage of a fatal car crash. You might find this content disturbing.” Other subjects didn’t receive any warning. All participants were then exposed to the content and asked to report on the extent to which they experienced distress, negative emotions or intrusive thoughts about it.

Across all the variations in the studies, trigger warnings had trivial effects. In the words of Mevagh Sanson, senior author of the study, “The results suggest a trigger warning is neither meaningfully helpful nor harmful.”

Perhaps trigger warnings could be beneficial for students who suffer from depression or post traumatic stress disorder, as the Cornell student resolution suggested. Proponents for the warnings argue that they could prevent negative reactions, but experts on anxiety disorders, like Harvard’s Richard McNally, suggest just the opposite – an increase in emotional vulnerability to trauma following warnings.

In a 2018 study, McNally and his colleagues found that subjects given trigger warnings prior to reading literary passages that varied in disturbing content reported greater anxiety to material perceived as harmful than did subjects receiving no warnings. While the study did not include previously traumatized individuals or those with clinical disorders, many mental health clinicians are likely to view trigger warnings as counter-therapeutic because they encourage individuals to continue to avoid any reminders of prior trauma. Such avoidance reinforces, rather than reduces, anxiety, inadvertently leading individuals to believe that their prior trauma remains laden with danger.

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