Now that the podcast of the Intelligence Squared debate is up and the show is beginning to run on the radio, I’m seeing a bit of new site traffic from viewers and listeners. Hi!
If you’re interested in more background on the arguments I made in the debate, here are some links…
- The current wave of attention to campus free speech issues and political correctness is in large part a response to Jonathan Chait’s January New York magazine essay “Not a Very PC Thing to Say.” I wrote a critique of that essay’s arguments here, as well as several followups you can find in the archives.
- I’ve written about the violent suppression of peaceful student protest in the University of California on many occasions. A few examples can be found here, here, and here. A full year before the pepper-spray incident at UC Davis captured the nation’s attention, I expressed my fear that the UC police’s accelerating spiral into violence could end in tragedy.
- I wrote about Wendy Kaminer’s controversial appearance on the Smith College panel before the debate, and recapped our IQ2 discussion of it here.
- I wrote about trigger warnings in the classroom in Inside Higher Ed last spring, and again in a syndicated newspaper op-ed. I’ve been interviewed for a number of stories on the subject, most of which can be found here.
If you’d like more background on anything else I said, feel free to let me know. And if you’d like to continue the discussion of the issues that we tackled in the debate, just leave a comment and I’ll be sure to respond.
studentactivism.net 
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March 8, 2015 at 11:45 am
Lirael
I found this blog pretty recently, but not through the Intelligence Squared debate – I think it was through some combination of Lawyers Guns & Money and Amptoons’ Alas, A Blog. It’s quickly become high on my recommended list.
I want to thank you for your humane attitude toward trigger warnings/content notes. After last year’s debacle of a debate in the academic blogosphere, and then Chait’s resurrection of the idea that trigger warnings are censorship, it’s such a breath of fresh air. I wish I’d seen your Twin Cities op-ed (which I think makes your policy a little clearer than the IHE column) last year when it came out. The combination of the very general but clear initial warning that makes it clear that students can step out if they need, the fact that you “provide examples…when we review [the syllabus] together,” and the invitation for students to come talk to you personally if they need to talk about this seems like a useful way to structure such a warning for a classroom setting. I will say that I think it’s the latter two of these elements that really make the policy, and that only a general warning, without them, wouldn’t be terribly useful, at least not for me. You and Hope Jahren are practically the only professors I’ve seen taking public stances that I don’t find completely alienating on this.
I’m fortunate in that as a STEM grad student I’m unlikely to run into my triggers in classroom content. I run into them other times, though, and I know how useful some sort of warning – whether that’s a “formal” trigger warning, or a title or post tag that gives me an idea of what I’m about to see – can be for avoiding a terrible reaction. You teach history, and a history class would absolutely be a place in academia where I might encounter triggers. A documentary about the ’60s that suddenly cut to 1968 DNC police riot footage would do it for sure. I know that it would do that because I had that happen while watching such a documentary at an activist meeting once. I know someone who picked up her triggers at the same place and time that I did, who in fact had this happen in a history class.
There’s this very strange belief out there that proponents of trigger warnings are making a negative value judgment on material, or trying to run it off the Internet and/or out of the classroom, by putting a warning on it. On the contrary. A lot of what would trigger me, is material that I think is vitally important. I use post tags to put trigger warnings on my own blog posts – do people think I’m trying to censor my own writing?