‘Me Tarzan – you snowflake!’ Top uni’s warnings on children’s books
THEY are enduring children’s classics that have enthralled millions of youngsters down the generations.
But books including Tarzan, Robinson Crusoe and Black Beauty might be too much for today’s delicate university students, academics fear.
Leeds University chiefs have slapped ‘content warnings’ on dozens of works studied by undergraduates on its English courses, including many titles normally considered to be children’s books.
So although all 16 film and TV versions of Black Beauty have been rated U or PG – meaning that they should ‘not unsettle a child aged around eight or older’ – the young adults heading to Leeds are warned that Anna Sewell’s 1877 novel contains ‘depictions of cruelty to animals’.
Daniel Defoe’s 1719 adventure story Robinson Crusoe is also flagged up on the grounds that it ‘discusses race and slavery’ as well as ‘attitudes typical of its time’.
The castaway tale also ‘features racist language and depictions of racial violence’, students at Leeds are warned.
A similar warning has been slapped on Edgar Rice Burroughs’s 1912 classic Tarzan Of The Apes. Undergraduates are told that the story of an orphaned boy raised by primates contains ‘expressions of racism’.
The warnings are the latest in a series uncovered by The Mail on
Sunday using Freedom of Information legislation. Previous examples include Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre, Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist and Great Expectations, and – in a move described as ‘beyond parody’ – George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four.
Tory MP Andrew Bridgen said last night: ‘Each week brings more ludicrous examples of universities cosseting adults from the “horrors” of children’s literature.
Universities are supposed to be places of higher learning. Perhaps the first thing that they should be teaching their students is that the real world doesn’t come with a trigger warning.’
The Leeds University warnings come in a 17-page document issued by its school of English, giving content notes for 63 of the 71 modules which make up its undergraduate courses. Individual warnings identify 43 novels, plays, poems, films and other texts with a long list of ‘potentially troubling or sensitive’ content such as war, death, violence, suicide, sexuality, race and racism, abortion, social class, poverty, destitution, transphobia, eating disorders and the use of hate speech and outdated and unacceptable language.
Jeremy Black, emeritus professor of history at Exeter University, said the sheer number of warnings Leeds issued ‘denudes any individual warning of value,’ and makes the content warnings ‘objects of satire’.
A Leeds University spokesman said last night: ‘We actively encourage our students to encounter new ideas and experiences, and we find that content notes provide a supportive way to introduce a wide range of texts.’