I’ve long considered one of the pillars of a liberal arts education to be the active questioning of one’s own cherished beliefs, positionality and worldview.
Learning happens by interrogating one’s assumptions, data and culture. Threats to this approach to education on the Fort Lewis College campus today come in the form of trigger warnings and censorship. Trigger warnings and censorship are claimed by some to be beneficial because they alert students to course or book content that might precipitate an unwelcomed, intense emotional response and, therefore, they are said to protect students from discomfort.
This assumes that students are extraordinarily fragile and that they require faculty to protect them from psychologically damaging course material. Rather than seeing challenging course material and the college experience as an opportunity to learn, some course content and faculty are being cast as insensitive or worse.
My reason for writing this column is to expose that trigger warnings and censorship are present on the FLC campus, and I fear that this situation will be normalized or accepted as business as usual.
Here are four recent examples:
A tenured biological and forensic anthropology professor – think “bones” – was requested by other FLC faculty members to post trigger warnings not only on all of her course syllabuses, but also on her course catalog listings. The requesting faculty maintain that these actions would demonstrate cultural sensitivity with the implication that her academic research is somehow insensitive. The reality is that such measures also may influence students and administrators to question the political and ethical correctness of these courses, their content and their instructors.An untenured faculty member was requested by one or more senior FLC faculty to remove a flyer they had posted around campus that advertised a new course. The poster had a picture that was deemed offensive or insensitive for some students and campus guests. The untenured professor created and posted a new flyer without the “offending” photo. One could reasonably assume that this untenured professor felt afraid of the consequences if they had not acquiesced to the request made by senior faculty.Center of Southwest Studies’ Delaney Library pulled volumes of peer-reviewed books from normal circulation and were placed in a restricted area known as “the vault.” Now, neither students nor faculty can freely browse these volumes. I was informed that these books contain images and/or information that the library and center deemed sensitive or offensive to some students.A complaint was filed with the Institutional Review Board claiming that an IRB-approved research protocol of a four-member research team was exploitative, their methods flawed and that their research was “potentially” emotionally harmful to the student research subjects. The complaint suggested that the research could trigger adverse feelings in the student research subjects. An internal IRB review was conducted despite there being no evidence of actual harm. The research protocol was voluntarily canceled by the researchers. I believe that their decision to cancel was because two of the four research faculty are not protected with tenure. An outcome of this IRB review amounts to the censorship of these four faculty because the administration decided they are no longer permitted to conduct this line of research.To issue trigger warnings, to remove pictures from campus walls, to remove books from library shelves and to prohibit someone from conducting their legitimate research undermines the ability of students to fully engage the material however challenging. These examples also are all violations of the principles of a liberal education at the very least and, at worst, they are forms of censorship.
It is preferable for students to be exposed to language, research, images and books that push them emotionally, intellectually and culturally, as opposed to them being shielded from these things or of having others mediate their exposure.
As Dr. Barbara Morris, FLC provost, said during this fall’s convocation – students must be willing to contend with a diversity of ideas and persons, that each student should extend one’s previous intellectual and personal boundaries and embrace “a willingness to submit (one’s) beliefs and hunches to the test of critical dialogue” with others.
My responsibility is to determine how best to teach a range of materials to generate critical dialogue, including materials that students may find troubling because of their own personal, cultural or religious views. It is better to assist students to confront the things they might not like, rather than to shield them from it.
Preparing students with strategies to cope with the world as it is, in ways that are constructive and beneficial to them as individuals and citizens, is to accomplish my job as a teacher and mentor.
David Kozak, Ph.D., is a professor of Anthropology at Fort Lewis College. Reach him at kozak_d@fortlewis.edu. A full-length version of this column was circulated to all FLC faculty on Sept. 21 and can be read at http://bit.ly/2fWTlpa.
