If you need trigger warnings, you’re probably not ready for college. Professor Jacobson is quoted in this story.
The Daily Caller reports:
Cornell University Rejects Student Demands To Insert ‘Trigger Warnings’ Before Class DiscussionsCornell University rejected a student government proposal to insert trigger warnings in class syllabi to warn students about “traumatic content” that could be discussed, according to an email obtained by the Daily Caller News Foundation.The Cornell University Student Assembly unanimously voted to approve Resolution 31 during its March 23 meeting, which would “require instructors who present graphic traumatic content that may trigger the onset of symptoms of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) to provide advance notice to students and refrain from penalizing students who opt out of exposure to such content,” its text reads. The university rejected the resolution because it violates Cornell’s commitment to academic freedom and freedom of inquiry, according to an email obtained by the DCNF.“Academic freedom, which is a fundamental principle in higher education, establishes the right of faculty members to determine what they teach in their classrooms and how they teach it, provided that they behave in a manner consistent with professional ethics and competence, and do not introduce controversial matters unrelated to the subject of their course,” the email reads. “And freedom of inquiry establishes the right of students, researchers, and scholars to select a course of study and research without censure or undue interference.”The trigger warnings would inform students that content in the course could include reference to “sexual assault, domestic violence, self-harm, suicide, child abuse, racial hate crimes, transphobic violence, homophobic harassment [and] xenophobia,” according to the resolution. Students who opt out of participating in the discussion would not be penalized…William A. Jacobson, clinical professor of law at Cornell Law School, and founder of Legal Insurrection, called the student resolution a “manipulative powerplay.”“The Student General Assembly Resolution is a gross attempt at speech and academic content policing which infantilizes students, relies on faulty claims that academic content worsens PTSD, and violates the academic freedom of faculty,” he told the DCNF.
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