WARNING! This lecture may cause you offence
Students vote to be shielded from distressing and upsetting content
STUDENTS have asked for trigger warnings in lectures to avoid becoming distressed or upset, it has been claimed.
Undergraduates at the University of Aberdeen supported the motion to call for the introduction of ‘content warnings on all subjects that may cause harm to students’.
These will be included in lectures, reading lists and seminars.
Ivana Drdáková, the students’ association vice-president elect with responsibility for student welfare, proposed the motion.
She said fellow students should be shielded from unwanted references to subjects including racism, suicide, and sexual, substance and animal abuse.
The motion stated there were ‘multiple instances where the university failed to provide content warnings in their communications’.
Students voted to endorse the affirmation that ‘the introduction of content warnings would serve to self-guard students from reading and hearing
‘Prepare better for what I read’
about subjects which may cause harm to them’.
Miss Drdáková told the Times that some university staff were already using trigger warnings.
She said: ‘As a literature student, you inevitably come across literature that contains distressing scenes, for example, harm to animals. This is one of the things I do not like to read about.
‘I have been very lucky that my lecturer already uses content warnings for all of the books that we read on the course, and as such, I can prepare myself better for what I am about to read rather than be caught by surprise.’
Miss Drdáková, in her fourth year studying Scottish and English literature, said: ‘This policy does not stop the university from talking about these subjects. It calls on it to better safeguard students by presenting warnings and provide a list of resources when needed.
‘Students are still going to be exposed to all the material, they will just be aware of what they can expect and prepare emotionally. We all need to be more accepting and aware of people surrounding us and their experiences and protect each other.’
The university said it was aware the motion had been passed. A spokesman said: ‘This is being reviewed and no decisions have been made.’
In 2019 lecturers were forced to apologise after students attending a class on race complained about quotations from renowned black writers which included the word ‘negro’.
Undergraduates at the University of York said they had been left ‘distressed’ after an academic read passages which included the word from works by William Edward Burghardt Du Bois, an African-American sociologist and civil rights activist, and Frantz Fanon, a French psychiatrist and anti-colonialist – both black academics.
At the time, Dennis Hayes, a professor of education at Derby University, said: ‘These oversensitive students are the products of a therapeutic education system that has taught them they must never feel offended or uncomfortable.’