Cornell President Heroically Vetoes Student Effort To Add Trigger Warnings To Upsetting Course Material

Jim Steinfeldt. Getty Images.

NY Times- At Cornell, the students’ proposal suggested that the warnings be issued when course readings and discussions involved topics “including but not limited to: sexual assault, domestic violence, self-harm, suicide, child abuse, racial hate crimes, transphobic violence, homophobic harassment, xenophobia.”

It stipulated that “students who choose to opt out of exposure to triggering content will not be penalized, contingent on their responsibility to make up any missed content.”

The resolution was unanimously approved by the [student] assembly late last month. Less than a week after it was submitted to the administration for approval, Martha E. Pollack, the university president, vetoed it.

To Ms. Ting and other proponents of the measure, including the woman in the Korean American literature class, the administration’s swift rebuke was frustrating. “We have been characterized as triggered snowflakes,” said Shelby L. Williams, a sophomore who co-sponsored the resolution.

Quite a kerfuffle up in Ithaca these days. A group of students sent a unanimous resolution to the office of the President, ol' Martha Pollack, insisting that professors let the students know when they're about to see something upsetting. But Martha said no way, kids. We here at Cornell aren't going to cover your eyes while Jack paints Rose in Titanic. The world is a cold, dark, twisted place. You gotta grow up sooner or later. 

It would be easy to cast these students as your classic snowflakes, to ring the bell of collegiate sensitivity, to say that the next generation is doomed, blah blah blah. However, this story hints at a broader correction to the bubblegum sensitivity we've seen play out on college campuses (and TV, and the internet, and on and on) over the past five or so years. It certainly feels like the winds of political correctness, of walking on egg shells around sensitive material, of acquiescing to those who raise an entitled cry of hurt feelings, have shifted. 

For as little as I may think of Cornell, I can think of no better place for the resurrection of realistic, unapologetic academia to begin. Lead the way, big Red! Fuck your feelings. We are Cornell. Ithaca is Gorges. If you don't like it, transfer to Cortland. 

But, Professor Khalid said, addressing students’ mental health issues through trigger warnings is ineffective. It disempowers people by reducing their identities to traumatic events and “infantilizes” students whom professors should be preparing for adult life, she said.

Precisely. If students are warned that an upcoming assignment may contain upsetting passages, they will become upset. Or at the very least, they won't evaluate with the open mind they might have otherwise. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy. Nobody can maintain an objective perspective when they've been warned they might not like something ahead of time. It tips the hand toward fear, makes us consume the dish cautiously. 

With that said, there are plenty of students who have experienced horrific life trauma that will be summoned by course material. And to tell them simply to "suck it up" doesn't seem like the right answer either. If you've suffered from an eating disorder and a novel in your lit class features graphic scenes of an eating disorder, I don't know that being forced to read those scenes… helps prepare you for life somehow? 

But if the alternative is that the professor must warn you ahead of time, and then let you opt out of that assignment, and then the professor has to provide a different assignment for those students, that doesn't seem great either. College isn't some airplane with a passenger with a nut allergy whom we all must protect. You're meant to ingest mind-expanding lessons—be they chemical, literary, experiential, whatever. 

I don't have the answers. But President Martha Pollack just might. Well done, Cornell. Now back to the bottom of the Ivy League table of respect you go.