One thing that makes it hard to talk seriously about politics with Freddie deBoer is his dogged insistence that none of his antagonists on the left are willing to talk seriously about politics.
Actually, let me rephrase that, because I’m actually not just talking about one thing here, but two — his insistence that his interlocutors are willfully misrepresenting reality, and his insistence that they refuse to address crucial questions raised by their positions. I think of the first as an “everybody insists…” move, and the second as a “nobody will address…” maneuver. I’ve seen him go back to those two wells over and over — everybody’s making obviously false claims, and nobody will grapple with obvious dilemmas.
The last time I tried to engage with deBoer here on the blog, it didn’t go well. But yesterday he wrote a piece on trigger warnings, a subject that I think is really important, so I’m going to give it a whirl again, and this time I’m going to take his “everybody insists” and “nobody will address” claims head on.
I’m not going to insist! I am going to address! We’ll see how it goes.
Everybody Insists #1:
“I cannot tell you how many times I’ve been told, with absolute confidence, that “no one is talking about actually regulating content!” Which just is not true … there have always been campus leftists who think that many types of speech that we generally acknowledge as legitimate political expression should be banned. … Stop telling me from the media bubble you live in that these attitudes don’t exist, just because they resemble a conservative stereotype.”
Yes. Those attitudes exist. There are people on the left who want to restrict certain speech. Why won’t we admit it? Well, I just did, and plenty of others have, but yeah, sure, we don’t often shout it from the rooftops.
Why not? Partly because the people who want to actually ban speech aren’t particularly powerful in, nor representative of, the broader left campus movement. Partly, in this instance, because trigger warnings are speech, not speech suppression, so the question doesn’t seem all that germane. And partly because the campus left’s critics are really really eager right now to cast any left criticism of others’ speech as opposition to free speech.
I’ve written about this before, a bunch of times. About how most of Jonathan Chait’s examples of hostility to free speech were actually examples of people engaging in political debate. About how Wendy Kaminer accuses those who call her a bigot of committing acts of censorship. More recently, in the latest high-profile attack on campus PC (an Atlantic magazine cover story) free speech activist Greg Lukianoff said that “a claim that someone’s words are ‘offensive’ is not just an expression of one’s own subjective feeling of offendedness. It is, rather, a … demand that the speaker apologize or be punished by some authority for committing an offense.”
This is ridiculous. Describing someone’s words as offensive isn’t censorship, or a call for censorship. It’s criticism. And the fact that civil libertarians have become so quick to conflate the two is to my mind an incredibly ominous development.
So yes, there are people on the campus left who want to suppress others’ speech. But no, they’re not representative of the movement, and many of the media’s favorite examples of this supposed trend are fabricated or distorted beyond recognition. So sure, I’ll say what you want me to say, but not without making it absolutely clear that I’m not signing on to a larger fraudulent narrative.
Nobody Will Address #1:
“Next, the relationship between PTSD and trigger warnings. There’s absolutely no clarity on a very basic question: are trigger warnings intended to help those who suffer from PTSD? … When we talk about ‘triggers,’ are we talking about PTSD? I have read thousands and thousands of words on this subject, and I have no idea.”
I was, I believe, the first American professor to share his syllabus trigger warning publicly. I’ve written in support of classroom trigger warnings in Inside Higher Ed, Slate, and The American Historian. I’ve talked about them on NPR, and been interviewed about them a bunch of places. My own syllabus trigger warning has been adopted or adapted by professors at a long and growing list of universities. So while I can’t speak for everyone on this subject, I think it’s fair to say I’m not just some random guy.
So here’s my attempt to provide clarity:
I’m not a mental health professional. I’m not competent to diagnose or treat PTSD, and it’s not my place to do so. But as I wrote in Inside Higher Ed, “it’s not just trauma survivors who may be distracted or derailed by shocking or troubling material.”
My own trigger warning has been shaped by my reading on the subject of trauma, and by my conversations with survivors of trauma, but it’s not intended as a clinical intervention and it’s not intended to be used only by PTSD sufferers.
Nobody Will Address #2:
“Nor is there any notion of how to handle cheating and abuse. … What are we supposed to do with students who frivolously claim to have suffered trauma? … What do we do to decide who can fairly claim to have suffered trauma, and access the special dispensation that might come with it?”
My syllabus trigger warning doesn’t provide students who invoke it with any special privileges, so this isn’t really an issue for me — and as I said above, my text has been pretty widely adopted, so it’s not an issue for those professors either.
Speaking more generally, there are three paths a professor can take when asked for an accommodation from a student — offer the same accommodation to everyone, require that the requesting student provide proof of need, or apply their own judgment. I can see any of those approaches working in a trigger warning context.
Everyone Insists #2:
“I have been told directly by people who are in favor of trigger warnings that to attempt to determine if someone really has PTSD, or some other, vaguer form of trauma, is to ‘revictimize’ them. So what are educators and institutions supposed to do? The closest thing I get to a response is ‘no one would do that.’ No one would do that? Really? No college student would take advantage of a special dispensation you’ve created that inarguably gives them a certain amount of transactional power in their interactions with an instructor?”
Of course there will be students who try to game any system. But for the reasons I laid out above, that fact is irrelevant under some trigger warning schemes, and addressable under others.
Nobody Will Address #3:
“Then there’s the fact that, in the actual medical literature on PTSD, triggers are discussed not as intellectual subjects like rape or war but as sensorial impressions like a sound or a small or a play of light. Or the fact that there’s no extant medical literature that demonstrates that trigger warnings actually have provide demonstrable relief to the people who suffer PTSD. That stuff isn’t even discussed.”
Again, I’m not a clinician. But here’s an article in a psychiatric journal about Second World War veterans’ combat PTSD being triggered by fiftieth-anniversary commemorations of the end of the war. There are plenty of others like it. As for the question of whether trigger warnings could provide relief for PTSD sufferers, it’s my understanding — and again, I’m not an expert — that many practitioners recommend controlled, managed exposure to potential triggers as a way of reducing their potency. Controlled exposure to potentially traumatic material is exactly what my own trigger warning is designed to facilitate.
Nobody Will Address #4:
“Finally, there’s the rhetorical condition of the discussion we have. I think this piece from Lindy West emblemizes it:
Maybe we can all get flippant and condescending about trigger warnings after we build a world where more than 3% of rapes lead to conviction, where we don’t shame and blame people for their own victimisation, where men don’t feel entitled to women’s bodies, and where millions of people aren’t moving through life yoked with massive, secret traumas.
This strikes me as a classic example of a common progressive category error: this terrible injustice exists (and it does), so therefore you have to get on board with this heavy-handed policy that cannot possibly actually reduce that injustice. I am totally unclear as to how trigger warnings actually combat any of the problems that West identifies in that paragraph.”
West’s claim isn’t that trigger warnings will combat those problems, but that hostility to trigger warnings — specifically “flippant and condescending” hostility — stems from the same societal sources that they do. As she writes: “It’s almost as though, coded as feminine and largely associated with rape victims, the antipathy toward trigger warnings is about something else entirely.”
What she’s saying is that in order to have a serious conversation of the merits and demerits of trigger warnings, we must first acknowledge that a lot of the antipathy toward them is driven by deeper-rooted misogyny. You can agree with that argument or disagree with it, but don’t claim that she doesn’t make her case.
Nobody Will Address #4:
“How exactly is anyone supposed to have a conversation after a statement like that is made? How are we supposed to sort good from better when the rhetorical cudgels of rape, victim blaming, male entitlement, and secret trauma have been deployed?”
Like this. Like we’re doing right now. You have a conversation. You talk about the issue, instead of (or in addition to) complaining about how we talk about the issue.
Nobody Will Address #5:
“I genuinely believe that there is a meaningful common ground that people can find on this issue. But I have no idea how to find it, when as soon as you raise concerns with the practice, you’re relegated to the role of victim blamer and trauma denier. There’s no way to address this issue constructively under those conditions. None.”
If you want to have a constructive conversation about trigger warnings, Freddie, here we are. If you want to dig in and talk about pedagogy and student vs faculty power and classroom management and PTSD, that’s a conversation that’s happening, and it’s one you’re invited to join. If you want to join, join. If you don’t want to join, don’t. But don’t claim that nobody else is willing, because plenty of us are.
studentactivism.net 
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August 26, 2015 at 10:52 am
wobblywheel
It seems to me that the question of whether to put TWs onto a syllabus, or how if at all to signal to students that some course material might be very intense, should really be up to the professor — who is after all the person with the most expertise in the materials on the syllabus, and the person who has thought through possible student reactions to that material in the most depth.
I think the outcome which de Boer and others are worried about is the idea that some assistant vice dean of trigger warnings, whose only degree is in Business Management or something, would have the power to shape syllabi on subjects that they have no expertise in.
August 26, 2015 at 11:07 am
Freddie deBoer
You know I spent hours yesterday — hours– debating with anti-speech campus lefties, both in person and on Twitter. I didn’t see you pop in to stick up for the right to free speech! I find it strange that a self-identified supporter of free expression spends literally 0% of his time actually defending such rights, for any reason, under any circumstance, and spends so much of his time concern trolling free speech, insisting that any actually-existing impediment to free exchange is no such thing, and generally siding again and again against those saying that their rights are being obstructed. Weird!
The NUS in Britain is one of the largest student organizations in the world. It’s made up of 600 student unions across that country. It has real power on campuses there. It’s official policy is no platforming. And while the original policy was meant only to refer to racists and fascists (and setting aside the issue with defining that), as time has gone on that definition seems to grow and grow, with numerous incidents of students calling for denying platforms to speakers with perfectly mainstream views. Does that concern you? Is there really no reason, at all, to fear for the future of free expression on campus? Do you think the Kipnis affair — an attempt to use the violent power of the state to punish a professor for writing an essay — came from nowhere? That it was a completely random inciden, with no connection to current campus political culture? What about all the people who have said that the students were right to file the Title IX complaint? What about all of the student protesters who called for formal university censure of Kipnis, for writing an essay they didn’t agree with? Are they, also, too powerless to be taken seriously? Or do you have some convoluted justification for why trying to get professors punished for not sharing your views doesn’t constitute a free speech violation?
See, I have this crazy attitude towards students like those: I take them seriously. I listen to what they say, and I engage with it critically. Because if you’re an educator, rather than ideologue, that’s what you do; you take student ideas seriously, even if you’re sure they’re generally unpopular or powerless. Which just goes to show that I actually respect those students more than you do. When you say “don’t worry about those students, they’re too powerless to do anything,” that’s not a defense. It’s patronizing dismissal.
August 26, 2015 at 2:28 pm
Angus Johnston
Wobbly, I’m not sure that’s deBoer’s primary concern — he didn’t raise it in this post, and I don’t think I’ve seen it from him elsewhere — but yeah, it’s a common one.
So I’ll say again what I’ve said before: Trigger warnings should never be mandated by administrators. They should always be voluntary on the part of the professor.
And right now, in the United States, they ARE always voluntary, and there’s no indication that that’s likely to change. No American campus requires trigger warnings, and the highest profile example of a proposed trigger warning policy — the recent one at Oberlin — was a VOLUNTARY policy that was rejected anyway.
I’m on record against mandatory trigger warnings, and if I come to see them as a real threat to academic freedom I’ll be talking a lot more about their downside. But as of now, it’s a non-issue.
August 26, 2015 at 3:12 pm
Angus Johnston
Freddie, you don’t follow me on Twitter and I don’t follow you, so there’s no reason you should know this, but I actually spent a pretty big chunk of yesterday over there defending the free speech rights (and academic worthiness) of a right-wing student — Brian Grasso, the Duke “Fun Home” opt-outer. A quick glance at my timeline would have showed you that.
As for the claim that I spend “literally 0% of [my] time actually defending” free expression, it’s false. Wildly false.
Let’s set aside the mountain of things I’ve written in support of the free speech rights of left-wing students, since you’ll likely argue that they don’t count — even though many of those students are ones whose speech I disagree with, and even though the arguments I’ve made in their support have frequently been content-neutral. I won’t quibble.
In addition to them, I write regularly about the free speech rights of high school students, including right-wingers and students whose speech is apolitical. I’m particularly interested in federal court jurisprudence in that area — see this post for a representatively dorky example.
I also write fairly often about non-ideological free speech issues involving college students. (Here’s one of my favorite examples of that genre.)
And yes, I write in defense of right-wing college students on free speech questions too. I did a lot more of that kind of writing back in the days when this blog was more newsy, but I still do it on occasion — the most recent one I remember was a post arguing that the U of Oklahoma president didn’t have the right to unilaterally expel the UO students who were taped leading a racist chant this spring.
You are correct that I’m critical of lots of allegations of free-speech violations. I find many such allegations spurious, and when I do, I do my best to explain why. You’re welcome to disagree with my analysis, but to say that I don’t write about free speech, or that I only write about it when my political allies’ rights are being violated, is, again, false.
I haven’t written about the NUS no-platform issue for two reasons. First, I don’t write much about the NUS, because I don’t feel like I understand it well enough to say much of value about it. Second, I think the free speech issues involved in a no-platform policy — in which an organization chooses not to sponsor or endorse speakers it disagrees with — are themselves complex. I’ve tweeted others’ articles on the subject, from various perspectives, but I haven’t done enough research to be confident of my own views on the topic. I’ve certainly seen examples of no-platforming that I’ve found questionable, though, and I suspect I’ve said as much on Twitter.
As for Kipnis, the claim that people went after her because she wrote “an essay they didn’t agree with” strikes me as a misrepresentation. The allegation there (as I recall it) was that the essay made false and defamatory statements about a student who had sued Northwestern, the university that employs Kipnis, for sexual harassment, and that the essay thus amounted to a retaliatory action. I did some research on those claims, but found them legally and evidentially murky enough that I never got around to writing anything up. (My recollection is that I found the claim that Kipnis misrepresentated the facts of the case well-grounded, but the claim that those misrepresentations amounted to actionable retaliation weak.)
Do I frequently write essays critical of student activists I see as hostile to free speech? Occasionally I do, but generally, no, I don’t. I don’t frequently write essays critical of student activists of any political orientation. It’s just not where I choose to put a lot of energy — it’s a beat that’s more than adequately covered elsewhere, for one thing.
When asked, however, by students or others, I’m happy to give my opinion, as I did with the NUS and Kipnis here.
But I thought we were here to talk about trigger warnings?
August 26, 2015 at 4:24 pm
wobblywheel
Angus, I’m glad you don’t think TWs should always be voluntary on the part of the professor. But I think de Boer is right when he says that there are people with much more coercive attitudes than you, when it comes to this issue. Google “Resolution to Mandate Warnings for Triggering Content in Academic Settings.” There’s genuine political energy around the idea that admins and students activists should join forces to assert more control over profs’ syllabi.
August 26, 2015 at 4:25 pm
wobblywheel
Sorry, typo above, should read ” I’m glad you think TWs should always be voluntary” etc.
August 26, 2015 at 4:32 pm
Angus Johnston
I’m aware of the resolution you refer to, Wobbly. It was passed by the UCSB student government more than a year ago, it has no enforcement power, and it has not been taken up by the faculty or administration of the university.
If we freaked out every time a student government passed an ill-conceived resolution, we’d have time for nothing else.
August 26, 2015 at 5:03 pm
wobblywheel
Maybe the TW freakout is unwarranted. But it’s hard for me to believe it’s totally unrelated to stuff like the Kipnis incident, where you had students urging administrators and federal bureaucrats to punish a professor for having published an essay. When I was in college (early 00s), “getting the prof in trouble” was strictly a tactic of the campus right. I don’t want to see those tactics seep over to the campus left, and I think it’s good to be vigilant about making sure they don’t.
August 26, 2015 at 5:21 pm
wobblywheel
I think some profs would probably benefit from rethinking how to present especially intense material. At the same time, I think many campus activists need to consider whether some of their current tactics aren’t inadvertently giving administrators an opening to assert greater top-down control over faculty — something the left (especially the YOUNG left) should be opposed to.
August 26, 2015 at 5:35 pm
Angus Johnston
Wobbly, I remember three student protests against bigoted profs from my undergrad days, and I know they happened plenty of times in the sixties. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with students going after a professor if the professor deserves going after.
In the case of Kipnis, as I said to Freddie, it wasn’t just a matter of not liking her speech — the complaint (at least the formal one) was that she had committed a Title IX violation by retaliating against a student who had brought a sexual harassment complaint against another professor. It’s not my impression that the Title IX claim wasn’t a strong one, and my recollection is that it was dismissed, so I’m not inclined to get too worked up about it.
That raises an important point, I think. Does everyone who’s involved in a diffuse political movement need to publicly call out every questionable action by someone else affiliated with that movement, or is it okay to sometimes see something online, quietly shake your head, and move on with your day? It’s not my impression that Kipnis’s job was ever in any real danger, and if it had been, it would have been university officials and the courts, not complaining students, who brought her down. She said some jerky things, and she got a huge amount of legitimate criticism, and a couple of students brought charges against her that were quickly dismissed. If you think she shouldn’t have suffered professional repercussions for her speech, isn’t the takeaway here that the system worked?
I mean, yeah, it’s important to speak out when you see injustice happening, and yeah, there’s a particular obligation to do so when the injustice is being perpetrated in your name. I get that, and I do my best to act accordingly. But I don’t think that means that I have to scour the FIRE blogfeed for every problematic utterance by a lefty undergrad and note my outraged objection to each one.
The other day I saw a guy walking down a Manhattan sidewalk picking up dropped tissues and candy wrappers. Part of me admires his civic-mindedness, but it’s not a hobby I’m going to be taking up myself.
August 26, 2015 at 5:40 pm
Angus Johnston
And as for your second comment, Wobbly, I honestly don’t see student pressure for obligatory trigger warnings going anywhere. I just don’t. I don’t see evidence that it’s building support as a student demand, and I don’t see evidence that administrators are glomming onto it. I think it’s an idea that seems to certain people to be a good solution to a real problem, but one that isn’t actually attractive to anyone in a position to implement it.
Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe we’re on the cusp of a wave of mandatory trigger warnings sweeping the nation and curtailing faculty freedoms. If so, you can save the link to this comment and mock me when it happens. I’ll deserve it. But I’m just not seeing any compelling evidence that that’s an outcome we need to be organizing to prevent.
August 26, 2015 at 6:00 pm
wobblywheel
Well, from a faculty perspective (which you must share to some extent), top-down assaults on tenure, Title IX intimidation of professors for things they wrote, and student demands that professors’ rewrite their syllabi, start to seem more and more like they’re connected. But maybe this is just the usual professorial paranoia, I don’t know. My gut tells me they’re linked, but I don’t have real evidence to that effect.
As to your other question: yes, I think someone involved in a diffuse political movement should critique a questionable statement or action by someone else affiliated with that movement. That’s how movements evolve, is it not? IE through constant self-examination and fine-tuning of core principles.
August 26, 2015 at 6:07 pm
Angus Johnston
Wobbly, we have to pick and choose our fights. If we critique everything someone on our side does that we think is questionable, no matter how inconsequential it may be, we’ll never do anything else.
There are thousands of student governments in this country, each one passing multiple resolutions every week from September through May. I couldn’t read them all if I tried. Even the ones that make the local media are a firehose (I have a Google Alert — I know). And the ones that make the national media are often misreported, so critiquing any one of them cogently and fairly requires a significant amount of effort.
It’s just not possible to respond to them all, even if one had the hubris to assume that one’s own long-distance judgment trumped that of the folks actually involved. Sometimes, like I say, you need to just read the story, shake your head, and move on with your day.
August 26, 2015 at 6:19 pm
wobblywheel
Well, not every one individually, but if it seems like there’s a trend of student governments passing a type of resolution you take issue with, why not say so?
August 26, 2015 at 6:27 pm
Angus Johnston
Honestly, I can’t think of an example of a recent trend like that.
August 26, 2015 at 6:44 pm
wobblywheel
well the whole argument de boer and others are making is that student organizations coming out in favor of trig warnings and in favor of no-platforming mainstream ideas are in fact “trends.” i guess you disagree?
August 27, 2015 at 8:27 am
Angus Johnston
No-platforming is a British thing, rather than an American. I said a little bit up above about why I don’t write much about the NUS, but there’s also this — I don’t feel particularly confident that I could write anything about the issue of no-platforming that would sway the opinions of British students who weren’t already inclined to agree with me on the issue. There are lots of aspects of that debate that I’m just not conversant in, and I’m not at all sure that me yelling across the ocean telling them to clean up their act would do any good.
On trigger warnings I’ve written a lot, of course, and I’ve certainly said that I think they should be voluntary and why. I haven’t written a post about “Why Students Shouldn’t Be Advocating For Mandatory Trigger Warnings,” but anyone who’s interested in my views on that subject can easily find them.
And they do, by the way. I received email last year from one of the students who was most prominently cited as a campus advocate for mandatory trigger warnings, and they said that they thought my take on the issue was a sensible one. So there’s that.
My approach to interacting with left student activists I disagree with may not be as emphatic as Freddie’s, but to describe it — as he does — as “patronizing dismissal” is kind of silly. You don’t have to berate someone to let them know where you stand.
August 27, 2015 at 10:49 am
Lirael
@wobbywheel
“Well, from a faculty perspective (which you must share to some extent), top-down assaults on tenure, Title IX intimidation of professors for things they wrote, and student demands that professors’ rewrite their syllabi, start to seem more and more like they’re connected. But maybe this is just the usual professorial paranoia, I don’t know.”
This sounds way more harsh than I intend, but I’m not sure how to usefully rephrase it. Yes, this sounds like professorial paranoia to me, and it’s a professorial paranoia that I’ve found weirdly common. Do you think most undergrads are even aware of top-down assaults on tenure, or related topics like corporatization of the university? I’m a TA and I’ve learned that many of my undergrads don’t even know that their TAs are grad students, or the difference between adjunct and tenure track, let alone anything less rudimentary about how academia works.
They aren’t conspiring with politicians or administrators to degrade academic working conditions. They’re taking a model for dealing with a serious issue that they encountered on blogs and Internet forums – trigger warnings, and site policies about them, are common on social-justice-oriented blogs and forums, and also in TV/movie/book fandom and fanfiction, and have been for several years – and trying to import that model wholesale into a new and less familiar environment, that they’ve been immersed in, where they’ve noticed that the problem it was meant to solve has been neglected. You may think importing that model into the college classroom is completely misguided, but it’s not anything more sinister than that.
@Angus
I tried to leave a comment on your last post, but I don’t see it, nor do I see any message about being stuck in a moderation queue, so I’m wondering if WordPress ate it (WordPress won’t let me repost; it says it’s a duplicate comment). Anyway, I support students being able to get trigger warnings as accommodations through the campus disabilities office, which instructors would then be required to provide to those students as they’d be required to provide other accommodations requested by the disabilities office. I think this is important as a baseline. Beyond that, I think professors doing voluntary warnings to the class, of the sort that you’ve outlined, is great. In my attempted previous comment I linked to a blog post of mine where I attempted to lay out a sample university policy, and I’d be interested to hear your thoughts.
August 27, 2015 at 10:59 am
Angus Johnston
Lirael, every poster’s first comment to this blog is automatically held in moderation — I didn’t realize there wasn’t notification built in to that process, and I’ll see if I can find a toggle switch to change that.
Anyway, your first comment has been approved, this one and any future ones should go through automagically, and I’ve written a quick reply to the other one over in that thread.
August 29, 2015 at 11:32 am
wobblywheel
@Lireal:
I’m not saying that student activists are hanging out in smoke-filled rooms with politicians and corporate donors conspiring against professors while sipping fancy cognac. I’m saying that in urging more warnings against certain kinds of professorial speech, they’re inadvertently creating an opening for university administrators to exercise increased control over faculty (“for the students,” of course).
And sometimes it’s not even inadvertent. Northwestern student demands that university administrators swiftly condemn Kipnis, and that in the future all such condemnations come automatically (this was literally the student demand) are explicitly about urging greater top-down administrative controls over faculty speech.
@Angus (and sure Lireal too):
What I’ve never understood about the trigger warning concept is that depression or other negative emotions can be triggered by an incredibly long list of things which show up in art, literature, film, etc. Certain triggers — in particular sexual assault — always come up in the discussion about trigger warnings, but I don’t see why sexual assault should be prioritized ahead of alcoholism, war trauma, drug abuse, heartbreak, betrayal, claustrophobia, stuttering, disease, hatred, scary groups of people, mean stereotyping, and on and on. Great literature is practically woven from this stuff, down to the very thread. So…yeah I don’t get the demand. If students don’t want emotionally challenging material, then they shouldn’t be in the humanities. The whole point of the humanities is to be emotionally challenging and when it stops being emotionally challenging, then it really might as well not exist as an academic area.
August 29, 2015 at 12:43 pm
Angus Johnston
Wobbly, I think the question for me about claims that student agitation for student power is creating an opening for administrators to take power from faculty is whether, in a particular situation, there is any evidence of that being likely to happen. In this case I see no such evidence. In the absence of such evidence raising those kinds of concerns strikes me as a blanket argument in opposition to student power in any form.
Freddie believes (and I hope I’m not misrepresenting him here) that students, as a group, have more power than they should in relation to faculty, as a group. I think that’s absurd. I think that faculty have far more power than students in the classroom and that students should have more power than they do. Given that, I think a claim that a demand for student power actually benefits administrators needs to be grounded in specific compelling evidence.
As for the foregrounding of sexual assault in trigger warnings, my trigger warning doesn’t do that. My syllabus trigger warning is content neutral — it’s an invitation to students to bring to me issues that they may be aware of it and an acknowledgment that I may be bringing forward similar issues. Yes, there is a value in being challenged in the classroom, and everything I’ve written about trigger warnings acknowledges that. But shock for shock’s sake is a tawdry tactic, and I think it’s appropriate for students to push back against that.
August 29, 2015 at 3:15 pm
seth edenbaum
If you really need a trigger warning for everything you’re not ready to handle the responsibilities of self-government. The ACLU defended the right of the American Nazi to march in a town full of holocaust survivors. They won the case but they lost a lot of members. I’m not even sure they’d take it now.
And I’m sure as hell not going to follow you on discussions of foreign policy. The kids in Gaza have more important things to worry about than trigger warnings, but I’m sure the psychologists in Tel Aviv make a good living.
August 29, 2015 at 4:23 pm
Angus Johnston
Seth, I get the impression that you haven’t read any of my other writing on trigger warnings. If you’d like to chat about my position on the subject, I’d suggest that you at least read the post that immediately preceded this one — it should clear some things up.
August 29, 2015 at 7:12 pm
wobblywheel
@ Angus
Your approach to triggers sounds pretty reasonable. But that’s not what most TW advocates, especially on the student side, have been asking for.
August 30, 2015 at 8:07 am
Barry
Freddie: “You know I spent hours yesterday — hours– debating with anti-speech campus lefties, both in person and on Twitter. I didn’t see you pop in to stick up for the right to free speech! ”
Freddie, I was watching ‘Shark Week’ on TV, and didn’t see, you tweeting against sharks ripping helpless children to pieces. Guess we know where your funding comes from – Big Shark :)
I’m amazed at anybody who gives Freddie any respect whatsoever, because his comment is not particularly below his usual standards. What grad program are you in, again?
August 30, 2015 at 2:59 pm
seth edenbaum
My father spent his career teaching a large second rate urban university. One of the few good memories from the years before he retired was a kid who walked up to him at the end of first semester freshman comp and pounded my father’s desk with his fist, muttering, “Fuck the nuns… Fuck the nuns.” He was saying thank you. He’d been lied to all his life.
If my father were told to issue trigger warnings at the start of a class I’d like to think he say something like this: “I’m here to fuck with your head. It’s my job; get used to it or leave. If you want to whine I’ll introduce you to people who’ve been through more than you who’d do anything to be here where you are now.”
What a stupid fucking country.
http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2012/mar/20/age-of-ignorance/
“It took years of indifference and stupidity to make us as ignorant as we are today. Anyone who has taught college over the last forty years, as I have, can tell you how much less students coming out of high school know every year. At first it was shocking, but it no longer surprises any college instructor that the nice and eager young people enrolled in your classes have no ability to grasp most of the material being taught. Teaching American literature, as I have been doing, has become harder and harder in recent years, since the students read little literature before coming to college and often lack the most basic historical information about the period in which the novel or the poem was written, including what important ideas and issues occupied thinking people at the time.”
August 31, 2015 at 4:13 pm
Angus Johnston
Wobbly, I don’t know of any other syllabus trigger warning that’s been more widely adopted than mine, or of any prominent supporter of trigger warning’s who’s publicly objected to mine. In fact, I’ve only ever had one trigger warning supporter criticize mine, publicly or privately — out of all the tweets, blogposts, articles, interviews I’ve done, I’ve only had one negative response to my trigger warning from a TW supporter. Just one comment on one article from one random commenter. That’s it.
So yes, other people have proposed different things, but to act like what I’m doing is somehow outside the mainstream of what’s happening with syllabus trigger warnings at the moment, or out of step with what people are agitating for? I’d like to see some evidence.
August 31, 2015 at 6:33 pm
Edgar Allan Podunk
I’ve got to hand it to you Angus, attempting real discussion with an interlocutor as fundamentally dishonest, delusional and self-aggrandizing as Freddie DeBoer is an ambitious undertaking. Keeping up with his shifting goalposts may prove to be a Sisyphean task, but I’m rooting for you.
September 1, 2015 at 6:14 am
Aapje
@Angus
The problem I see with your blog post is that you are exaggerating the Everybody Insists and Nobody Will Address debating methods in deBoer’s writing. It seems a bit hypocritical to accuse an opponent of greatly exaggerating, when you do the same.
Let me address each one:
Everybody Insists #1: deBoer is not claiming that everyone insists that there is no censorship, he is claiming that many of his opponents do. Verdict: Many Insist.
Nobody Will Address #1: Your response seems to back up his point. You simply defend your own lack of scientific/medical backing for your use of trigger warnings, but you never disagree that Nobody Will Address the need for scientific proof. Verdict: appropriate use of Nobody Will Address
Nobody Will Address #2: Here deBoer sees a problem that you don’t. From his perspective you are not addressing that problem, while you don’t think that the problem exists. From his perspective, I can see why he would say that Nobody Will Address that issue. Verdict: subjectively appropriate use Nobody Will Address (if you agree with deBoer’s premises)
Everyone Insists #2: deBoer addresses an argument that he has heard. He never claims that Everyone Insists this. Verdict: Some Insist
Nobody Will Address #3: deBoer asks for specific research into trigger warnings, you respond with more general research that may not apply to classroom settings or the specific way that trigger warnings are used. Verdict: appropriate use of Nobody Will Address
Nobody Will Address #4: here deBoer just gives an example for the same point he made in Nobody Will Address #3. Verdict: not a separate argument
Nobody Will Address #4: You messed up your numbering, I guess. Anyway, here deBoer complaints about the debating style being used. In no way is this a claim that nobody will address a certain point. Verdict: Unfair Debating Style.
Nobody Will Address #5: See previous
So 3 of the 6 examples of Nobody Will Address actually claim that nobody will address something and all can reasonably be argued (which doesn’t mean you have to agree). The other 3, plus the 2 examples of Everybody Insists, are actually not present in his writing.
September 1, 2015 at 7:52 am
Angus Johnston
Aapje,
The question is not whether deBoer always and every time uses the “everyone insists” or “nobody will address” construction or a precise semantic equivalent. Of course I didn’t claim that, and it was, yes, a bit of a rhetorical device on my part to structure the essay as if he did.
Here’s the issue: That deBoer has a strong tendency to complain that others aren’t willing to engage in debates that either (a) are actually happening or (b) would happen if he’d start them. He’s far happier to argue about the quality of the debate than to actually advance the debate, in other words.
Let’s go back over the cases in this post:
In EI1, deBoer asks that his fellow leftists stop insisting that there are no pro-censorship forces on the left, presumably so that a debate can occur about what to do about those pro-censorship forces. I do. In NWA1 he asks that someone clarify whether trigger warnings are intended to help those with PTSD. I do. In NWA2 he asks how we are to serve as gatekeepers for our trigger warnings, and I say why I don’t see that as a debilitating problem. In EI2 he asks “what are educators and institutions supposed to do” if students try to game the system. I provide my answer. In NWA3 he raises a factually incorrect criticism of trigger warnings, which I correct. In NWA4 he complains that Lindy West is engaging in unsound argumentation, and I correct his misunderstanding of her post. In NWA4a (oops) he asks how we can talk about these issues in the face of such rhetorical bullying, and I answer. In NWA5 he insists that “there’s no way to address this issue constructively under those conditions,” and I disagree.
Do all of the examples precisely match up with the taxonomy I applied to them? Probably not. But to quibble about that strikes me as a further retreat from actually debating the actual issues on the table — I want to debate trigger warnings, Freddie wants to debate the debate, and you want to debate the debate about the debate.
There’s nothing wrong with debating the debate, or even debating the debate about the debate. But though I may have been guilty of exaggerating Freddie’s tendencies in this area, it is true that he is remarkably fond of, as I said once before, claiming that he wants answers when he actually wants people to admit that no answers exist.
You and I characterize deBoer’s arguments differently, and I appear to be more satisfied with my responses than you are. But you can’t say I’m not addressing the points that he made or the questions that he asked.
Freddie wrote: “I genuinely believe that there is a meaningful common ground that people can find on this issue. But I have no idea how to find it, when as soon as you raise concerns with the practice, you’re relegated to the role of victim blamer and trauma denier.”
In my post I didn’t relegate him to either of those roles. I engaged with his ideas and his concerns. And did he respond by joining me in a search for “meaningful common ground”? No. He ad-hommed me on Twitter and (falsely) called me a bad ally to free speech here, then disappeared until someone said something stupid and obnoxious to him about trigger warnings on Twitter, then wrote a whole huge blogpost defending his honor and attacking the obnoxious tweeter as What’s Wrong With The Left.
Which is his right. And I’m not saying he has an obligation to engage with me specifically. But the debate on trigger warnings that he claims to want — the debate that he claims is precluded by the nature of today’s left — is happening. It’s happening without him. And that’s by his choice.
September 1, 2015 at 10:57 am
Aapje
My objection to your rhetorical style was that you are essentially doing the same thing that you accuse him of, which doesn’t seem fair. You did address the issues as well, but only within a certain framing, where you accuse deBoer of making extreme statements by using those NWA and EI headings.
I’m not deeply familiar with deBoer or your shared history, but I detect some frustration on his part that people refuse to debate the issue on his terms. I do actually see the same thing in your blog post, so let me address (one aspect of) the issue at hand:
In NWA3 you quote deBoer who asked for 2 kinds of evidence:
1. That PTSD can be triggered by discussions
2. That trigger warnings prevent people from being triggered
You replied with a qualitative study of only 2 subjects that addresses his first request, but qualitative studies merely have value as a starting point for further research, to find promising avenues for quantitative studies. They are completely unacceptable as proof of causation. Basically, your were trying to proof your point by anecdote.
When you addressed his second point, you argued that your method of giving trigger warnings may be somewhat similar to how medical experts treat people for PTSD. So here you seem to claim that the usefulness of that treatment validates your method. Yet under NWA1 you claim about your method of giving trigger warnings that “it’s not intended as a clinical intervention.” You can’t have it both ways. Either your method substantially mimics clinical intervention and you can use the usefulness of clinical intervention to argue that it works or it doesn’t. Then you must surely want scientific evidence that your own method works in it’s own way.
As it is, you have only said that you think your usage of trigger warnings is useful, based on your experience. This means you lack a scientific basis for your method, which deBoer is asking for.
This seems to be a reasonable request. As it is, you run a risk that your method may be non- or counterproductive. Medical research has shown that patients are notorious for reporting positive results for any intervention, including placebo’s. Another example is that doctors have performed blood-letting for ages, which seemed to heal the patient due to the reduction in fever, but which actually reduced survival rates.
So I find your subjective belief that your method works, due to the positive feedback you get, very unpersuasive and unscientific.
September 1, 2015 at 11:46 am
Angus Johnston
Let’s dig into this, Aapje.
Freddie didn’t “ask for evidence” that PTSD can be triggered by discussion or that trigger warnings prevent people from being triggered. He stated flatly that (1) “in the actual medical literature on PTSD, triggers are discussed not as intellectual subjects like rape or war,” and (2) “there’s no extant medical literature that demonstrates that trigger warnings actually have provide demonstrable relief.” Those are affirmative claims, not requests for information. Let’s take them in turn.
His claim in (1) is, as I understand the concept of PTSD, flatly wrong. There are copious references in the literature to post-traumatic stress being triggered by references to similar trauma. I posted the links I did as examples, not proof — I don’t have any indication that the position I take is at all controversial. (Here’s one more link, from a major university research center’s page on PTSD: It takes it as a given that PTSD can be triggered by the kinds of stimuli we’re discussing here. http://www.med.upenn.edu/ctsa/ptsd_symptoms.html)
As for the claim in (2), I’m not arguing that medical evidence “validates my method.” I don’t claim, and have never claimed, that my use of trigger warnings in the classroom is supported by classroom-specific research. In responding to his narrow claim on that topic I wasn’t attempting to refute it, but to address it.
If there’s no specific, on-point medical literature supporting trigger warnings in the classroom, why do I offer them anyway? First, because I believe they are of use in situations other than PTSD. Second, because my layman’s understanding of PTSD treatment (grounded in some research and considerable discussion, but not intended as authoritative) suggests that my approach is consistent with generally accepted practice in that context. Third, because I have no indication whatever that what I’m doing could have a negative effect on PTSD sufferers. In other words, I believe that what I’m doing has a benefit for students who don’t have PTSD, that it might also help students who do, and that it carries no risk of harm to students in either group. That’s it. That’s my position.
I discussed the reasoning behind my trigger warning decision in detail in my IHE essay last year, by the way. I’d encourage you to read it if you haven’t:
https://www.insidehighered.com/views/2014/05/29/essay-why-professor-adding-trigger-warning-his-syllabus
September 1, 2015 at 7:09 pm
Aapje
In contrast to deBoer, I do believe that it is possible that PTSD can be triggered in a classroom setting. That doesn’t mean that important questions shouldn’t be asked:
– What kinds of PTSD occur in a university setting?
– What kinds of things can be triggering?
If you do not know the answer to these questions, then the entire concept of trigger warnings becomes nebulous, since you do not know which trigger warnings are useful and for which content they should be applied.
The example you gave in that essay of black students being taught about slavery is a good example. These kids didn’t experience slavery personally and while it may be a very emotional issue for them, I don’t see how they could have developed PTSD for this topic. So the way I see it, you already start off by wanting to apply your method to non-PTSD cases, despite your argument being build on PTSD. But for those cases all the PTSD research doesn’t necessarily apply. So what are you basing your method on then?
As for claim 2, you explicitly referred to medical evidence as support for your method, but you backpedal immediately when I asked for medical evidence for the specific method you are using. In your blog post, you describe your aim with the trigger warnings as “controlled, managed exposure to potential triggers as a way of reducing their potency”. I assume you are trying to mix exposure therapy with stress inoculation training, but you do both badly. You suggest that the student leaves if he considers the material disturbing. This is the opposite of exposure therapy. The goal of that therapy is generally that the patient ‘survives’ the exposure, without fleeing or panicking, so they learn that the threat isn’t real. There is a risk that the anxiety may be increased by having the student leave when he is disturbed. Avoiding a perceived danger tends to just increase the anxiety (‘You have to get back on the horse that threw you’). You also don’t tailor the exposure to the person with PTSD as a professional would.
Stress inoculation training consists of having the patient imagine herself in disturbing situations and handing her a bunch of skills to cope with these situations. This is tailored to the specific patient. In contrast, you provide just 1 universal coping strategy: leaving the room. This is just a form of evading, but you still require the student to learn the material, so they can’t evade the material forever. So the strategy you suggest seems quite unsuited to solve the problem the student may have.
When I see your method, I see a layman pretending to be a doctor, using a method that at the very best seems completely unsuited if the student has serious issues. You trivialize the risks of damaging your ‘patients’ and are basically experimenting on them, while there are known effective methods that could be used instead. This is considered unethical behavior in the medical community.
Finally, you ignore the possibility that students may evade effective medical help, due to what you offer. This is a serious problem for alternative medicine in general.
A more ethical alternative would be to refer your students to a professional if they experience symptoms of PTSD. Now, I’m being a bit harsh on you because you step out of your area of expertise into another, where different rules apply (and for good reason). I’ve given examples of how bad medical treatments can hurt patients, yet you completely downplay the risks of what you do. You have just enough knowledge to be dangerous, but not enough to realize that danger.
September 1, 2015 at 7:52 pm
Angus Johnston
Aapje, I have no idea where you’re getting the idea that my “argument is built on PTSD.” It’s not. It never has been. As I said in my original post, “I’m not a mental health professional. I’m not competent to diagnose or treat PTSD, and it’s not my place to do so.” And as I wrote in IHE (and quoted again here) “it’s not just trauma survivors who may be distracted or derailed by shocking or troubling material.”
My content note is intended as a pedagogical tool, not a clinical intervention. I’ve said that over and over, in this post and elsewhere. Again, I’d encourage you to read my IHE piece, if you haven’t:
https://www.insidehighered.com/views/2014/05/29/essay-why-professor-adding-trigger-warning-his-syllabus#sthash.FUT2vBN9.dpbs
September 1, 2015 at 8:51 pm
Angus Johnston
Let me take one more swing at the whole PTSD thing, because I think it’s important.
My introduction to trigger warnings, like most people’s, was in the context of internet content. I haven’t used them much in my own writing, but I do try to give a heads-up in the lede or headline of a piece when there’s going to be material further down that someone might prefer to have warning before seeing.
When the idea of classroom trigger warnings came up early last year, and I batted around the idea of incorporating them into my syllabi, I was coming from the same perspective — sometimes some folks are going to want a heads-up before encountering certain material, and if I could give them a such a heads-up in an unobtrusive way, without compromising my pedagogical principles, it seemed like a good idea to do.
Now, yes, while I was hashing all this out, I was reading stuff by, and having conversations with, survivors of trauma — again, among many others. But people with a PTSD diagnosis were never the core target audience of my content note, and the note was never intended as either a clinical intervention or a substitute for mental health care.
I think of it this way: If I enter my classroom and the lights aren’t on, I’m going to turn the lights on. Turning the lights on makes it easier for everyone to see, and may offer particular assistance to people (like myself) with some degree of visual impairment. But to say that — to say that turning the lights on might be of use to someone with bad eyes — is not the same as saying that turning the lights on is intended as medical care. It’s just a way of shaping the classroom environment to better fit, as best as I can, the needs of my students.
And no, I didn’t do scientific research before deciding to turn the lights on, and yes, I agree that turning the lights on isn’t a substitute for treatment by an optometrist. But no, I don’t think that my turning the lights on is going to cause my students to avoid or neglect eye care. And while it’s theoretically possible that my turning the lights on might actually be harmful to some students, that situation is one that I’ll have to address on a case-by-case basis should it ever arise.
I’m just turning the lights on. It’s not a big deal. If you’ve got evidence it’s harmful, let me know, but I see the benefits — pedagogical benefits, again, not clinical benefits — so the evidence will have to be more than supposition or guesswork.
Edit: Also, to suggest that I “provide just 1 universal coping strategy: leaving the room” is an utter misrepresentation of my content note and my classroom practice.
September 1, 2015 at 9:54 pm
LifeofMisAdventure (@JlnFrancisco)
“I’m here to fuck with your head. It’s my job; get used to it or leave. If you want to whine I’ll introduce you to people who’ve been through more than you who’d do anything to be here where you are now.”
Hmm, where did your old man find time to do any actual teaching?
September 2, 2015 at 5:46 am
Aapje
“My content note is intended as a pedagogical tool, not a clinical intervention. I’ve said that over and over, in this post and elsewhere.”
You have explicitly said that your method is intended to reduce the potency of triggers, based on psychological intervention used for PTSD sufferers. That is a psychological intervention, when judged by the intent that you say you have and the method you use! Your denial doesn’t change that fact, it just shows confusion on your part.
A pedagogical tool is intended to make students understand the material. Your content note in no way facilitates this. If it works as you intend, it may enable a student with a personal problem to engage with the material, by removing a barrier. However, solving a personal problem for a student is not a pedagogical tool. Adapting the university building to give access to disabled students would also allow those students to engage with your material by solving a problem they have, but it would also not be a pedagogical tool.
You seem to define methods by the context they are used in, not by the direct goal or working mechanism of the method, which is highly problematic. By your standard, a medical intervention becomes a pedagogical tool when a professor uses it and you can then ignore all ethical considerations.
“I’m just turning the lights on. It’s not a big deal. If you’ve got evidence it’s harmful, let me know”
Turning on a light is not a psychological intervention. The medical community has developed ethical standards, because their interventions can be harmful. Your approach is considered unethical in this community because you systematically use an unproven method over scientifically validated methods and apply an experimental method outside of the context of a scientific study.
Your casual ‘prove my method is harmful’ stance is especially problematic,
because you are shifting the burden of proof. As the person using an experimental psychological intervention, it is your job to monitor your subjects and figure out if there are long term benefits or negative effects.
“but I see the benefits”
Which may not actually exist, due to various reasons. Experimenters are known to suffer from confirmation bias, subjects are known to exaggerate the benefits of interventions for various reasons, the short term effect may seem positive, while the long term effect is negative (not observed by you), etc, etc. Since you fail to apply the scientific method, your observations are highly suspect.
From a scientific standpoint, your defense of your method comes down to no more than: ‘it feels good to me.’ Frankly, I find it highly problematic when a professor pushes for the adoption of a method, without even proposing that his method is validated scientifically. Perhaps this is acceptable in your field…
September 2, 2015 at 6:46 am
Angus Johnston
I’m going to try this one more time, Aapje, and then I think we’re done.
Here’s what my content note does:
1. It informs students that some material that’s discussed in the class may be troubling to some of them. (This fact is not in dispute.)
2. It notifies students of their rights in the classroom, specifically their right to discuss the curriculum with me in advance, their right to discuss their personal response to course material with me or with their fellow students, and their right to step out of the room if they need to, for any reason. (These are rights that students in my classes have always had, whether they were notified of them are not.)
3. It reminds them that they have an obligation to master the course material, even if they’re absent when certain material is discussed. (This has always been the case in my classes.)
Which of these three statements do you consider unethical for me to make, and why?
September 2, 2015 at 7:44 am
Angus Johnston
Just one more thing:
“solving a personal problem for a student is not a pedagogical tool”
A tool that addresses a classroom problem that impedes a student’s learning is absolutely a pedagogical tool.
September 2, 2015 at 9:29 am
Lirael
Angus, you said that a lot of profs are adopting your sample note. Which I find really heartening. You’re presumably exposed to a wider range of faculty as faculty than I am as a student. Do you have any sense of what portion of faculty are willing to go with approaches like yours?
As you might have been able to tell from my own post, one of my concerns is that such a large portion of faculty appear to be utterly contemptuous not only of the concept of trigger warnings, but of anyone who says they’d benefit from them. However, this might be an artifact of most people bothering to join the argument having strong opinions.
September 2, 2015 at 9:36 am
dj ripley (@laripley)
Excuse me, “scientifically validated methods” for being a good teacher? Somebody is not familiar with how professors are trained, if that’s the standard they want to hold professors to.
September 2, 2015 at 10:07 am
LifeofMisAdventure (@JlnFrancisco)
“Your approach is considered unethical in this community because you systematically use an unproven method over scientifically validated methods and apply an experimental method outside of the context of a scientific study.”
You’re aware no one is trying to diagnose or treat PTSD (or any other psychological condition for that matter) in these classrooms? How many times does that need to be reiterated before you get it?
September 2, 2015 at 1:49 pm
Leland's Axe
Aapje,
If I can briefly summarize your argument (let me know if I miss a step):
Trigger warnings are – at least in part – a prophylaxis against exacerbation/agitation of clinical PTSD —> therefore, the design and use of trigger warnings should follow clinical guidelines, preferably developed via unbiased studies of their efficacy and safety -> Angus has not, to your satisfaction, established study-based guidelines, and therefore his use of trigger warnings is “problematic”.
Frankly, I think there are problems with all three steps of your chain of logic, beginning with your premise. Classroom trigger warnings are not clinical interventions. They are, as Angus rightly points out, classroom tools designed to better facilitate learning and engagement with material.
But even if we accept that trigger warnings are supposed to serve some clinical function, that function is not an intervention, but a label: “X may be harmful to your health.” A clinical study of trigger warnings makes just as much sense as studying the efficacy of advising epileptics about flashing lights.
And finally, even if we did decide that a study was appropriate, we’d quickly realize that the logistics of organizing a study was nigh impossible. The sheer breadth and variety of material, classes, professors, and students means that any data from any study would be profoundly limited. The trade-offs between specificity and generalizability of clinical research means that any findings would be comically narrow or hopelessly broad – no better than the current system of allowing professors autonomy and discretion in their classroom.
September 2, 2015 at 5:36 pm
Aapje
Angus, I cannot debate you if you refuse to acknowledge the claim you yourself made. You explicitly claimed that your trigger warning is designed to be a form of treatment for PTSD sufferers:
“As for the question of whether trigger warnings could provide relief for PTSD sufferers, it’s my understanding — and again, I’m not an expert — that many practitioners recommend controlled, managed exposure to potential triggers as a way of reducing their potency. Controlled exposure to potentially traumatic material is exactly what my own trigger warning is designed to facilitate.”
You cannot claim that your method is merely a pedagogical tool, while also claiming that your method mimics psychological treatment in some ways and has the same goals as that treatment (“designed to facilitate”). At that point you are claiming to perform psychological treatment, whether you are able to acknowledge that or not.
I merely hold you to the same standard as I would hold anyone else who performs psychological treatment.
However, given the debate so far, I think that we have indeed reached an impasse. You can not look beyond your (fairly selective) rationalization that your method is only a pedagogical tool, which to me seems like a justification you use to avoid responsibility and dismiss criticism. You liken your method to psychological treatment to argue why your trigger warning is effective, but then claim your method is unlike psychological treatment when criticized. You can’t have it both ways!
I do not possess any more skills to make you realize this huge logical fallacy that you are employing, so we may have to just end this here.
September 2, 2015 at 5:50 pm
Aapje
@dj ripley & Leland’s Axe
While I do believe that professors should employ scientifically validated methods for teaching, which would be the logical consequence of an actual commitment to science, that was not my argument.
My argument is that professor Johnston is explicitly claiming that his trigger warning is a form of psychological treatment. I cannot read his own words any other way. Of course, ethical standards for psychological treatment are universal. So he should behave ethically by following those standards.
Especially since professor Johnston is not just experimenting on his own students. He is advocating the widespread use of his method, despite a lack of scientific support for the efficacy of his method. I consider it problematic when person who is supposed to dedicate his life to science acts this way.
September 2, 2015 at 5:56 pm
Aapje
@LifeofMisAdventure
“You’re aware no one is trying to diagnose or treat PTSD (or any other psychological condition for that matter) in these classrooms?”
Professor Johnston has explicitly said that (at least partial) treatment is a goal of his method. See the quote in my last response to him.
“How many times does that need to be reiterated before you get it?”
Preferably never again, since it is a false statement. False statements do not become true due to repetition.
September 2, 2015 at 8:37 pm
Angus Johnston
Aapje, I honestly don’t see how you make the leap from “my content note is designed to assist students who may wish to control their exposure to potentially traumatic material” to “my content note is a clinical intervention for PTSD sufferers,” but we’ve been around that carousel before, so I’ll drop it.
What I do find interesting, though, is that your entire objection to my practice appears to be based on your interpretation of my justification for it, and not at all on the text of the content note itself. (I asked you which of the three components of the note itself you found unethical, and you declined to answer.)
So it appears that other professors can ethically use the note in their own courses, so long as they don’t read this blogpost.
Which I do confess eases my mind considerably.
September 3, 2015 at 4:52 am
Aapje
Again, you described your method as being designed to facilitate controlled exposure, which you justify by explaining that such methods are used as psychological intervention in clinical settings. So by your own admission, your method is a variant of psychological intervention!
You claimed that the “note was never intended as […] a clinical intervention,” but that is a cop out. Imagine this scenario:
A teacher is handing out uppers & downers to his students, outside of medical supervision, to make them better learners. He says that he bases his method on ADD/ADHD literature/treatment, but that he is merely using a pedagogical tool. He justifies it by explaining that he sees good results in class, although he has no knowledge about long terms effects (and doesn’t see the need for scientific research of his method).
I assume you agree with me that the teacher’s method is unethical. If so, can you please explain to me exactly why your behavior, which is very similar, is suddenly ethical?
“So it appears that other professors can ethically use the note in their own courses, so long as they don’t read this blog post.”
No. If I find a pill of unknown composition and have you swallow it, that is unethical, no matter if the pill is poison or useful vitamins. Ignorance is not a defense, since I should be aware of my ignorance and act accordingly. Similarly, people who use trigger warnings to help people with trauma should be aware that ‘helping people with trauma’ puts them in a position of doing psychological intervention, regardless of whether that is their intent.
This comment by you is symptomatic of the severe lack of understanding of ethics that you display. Have you ever studied scientific ethics?
“What I do find interesting, though, is that your entire objection to my practice appears to be based on your interpretation of my justification for it, and not at all on the text of the content note itself. (I asked you which of the three components of the note itself you found unethical, and you declined to answer.)”
I have already commented on the note itself, but you dismissed my objections by pointing to one of your justifications for your method (you have inconsistent justifications). As long as you keep claiming that the ethical considerations surrounding psychological interventions don’t apply to your method, it is useless to make these ethical objections. You will just declare that they do not apply, as you did before.
September 3, 2015 at 10:08 am
Angus Johnston
Yes. Letting students know that they can step out of the room if they need to or talk to the professor during office hours is exactly like handing out random off-label drugs to kids. Glad we got that cleared up.
September 3, 2015 at 12:56 pm
Leland's Axe
Aapje,
You seem pre-occupied with one sentence, and disregard the numerous other paragraphs in the rest of the post and the comments where Angus describes – in patient detail – his understanding and use of trigger warnings in his classroom. You persist in knocking down and then resetting the same strawman over and over.
I might also add, as someone who has more than a passing familiarity with clinical medicine and scientific research, that there’s not a reputable psychiatrist in the entire country who would think that anything Angus is doing is unethical, or frankly even clinical – unless we have decided that “normal empathetic human interaction” is now a billable procedure. Your comparison of trigger warnings to professors illegally distributing drugs is wildly inaccurate and frankly makes you look like someone who is not arguing in good faith – or at least someone who is arguing from a position disconnected from mainstream clinical, ethical, educational, and legal paradigms.
September 4, 2015 at 3:10 am
Aapje
Angus, employing snark is a passive aggressive method to destroy a debate, which makes your earlier accusation that others are making it ‘hard to talk seriously about politics’ look rather hypocritical.
The comparison of your notes to medicine is valid, since your entire defense could apply to that situation as well. Imagine that we have a discussion about the legality of sodomy and your defense is that the state cannot tell people what to do in the bedroom. Then I could counter by giving the example of sex with underage children and note that your defense could also be used to defend that practice. My counter-example would then not be a claim that the two situations are exactly the same in reality, but a claim that your defense would come to the same conclusion (should be legal) for both. So at that point, you have to either defend sex with underage children _or_ change your defense of sodomy to make it only no longer apply to sex with underage children.
So I challenged you to either defend handing out drugs or explain why your notes are different from handing out medicine, in objective terms. Looking back at my last comment, I may have been unclear, but now I’ve explained my intent more clearly, I hope.
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Leland, in a debate people can be called on their words and then either have to defend them or take them back. You cannot simply declare crucial passages off limits for debate. That’s not how it works. I quoted the exact words professor Johnston used and gave my interpretation what they logically mean. He has not said that and explained how my interpretation is incorrect, which is what he would have to show to make my interpretation a straw man.
You also happen to engage in several logical fallacies by claiming to speak for every ‘reputable psychiatrist,’ which you clearly cannot. The word ‘reputable’ is an obvious preemptive move to make it impossible to disprove your claim by giving a counter-example, as you would then just argue that this person is ‘no true Scotsman.’
“normal empathetic human interaction”
Normal people can do so, but professor Johnston is supposed to be a man of science. He is advocating that his method be used by others. If you want to argue that it is proper for a professor to use anecdotal ‘evidence’ to argue that his method is not harmful & in fact beneficial and to not even advocate for scientific research into his method, you have a very, very low standard for professors.
I do admit that many people have very low standards, yet that doesn’t make it right.
September 4, 2015 at 8:44 am
Angus Johnston
Aapje, we’ve had our conversation. Our conversation is done. You’re not convincing me, I’m not convincing you. You think I’m not listening to you, I think you’re not listening to me. There’s nowhere for us to go from here.
So yeah, I wrapped up my frustration in a snarky little joke. But if you want the last word, go ahead. Take it.