University in England Puts Trigger Warning on Classics of Greek Mythology
“content warnings ‘help ensure students who may be affected by specific issues are not subjected to any potential unnecessary distress.’”
This is so absurd. If you need a trigger warning for the works of Homer, just go home. You’re clearly not ready for college.
The College Fix reports:
British university puts trigger warning on Greek mythology for ‘distressing’ content
The University of Exeter put a trigger warning on two classic pieces of ancient Greek literature, Homer’s “The Iliad” and “The Odyssey,” for what it calls “distressing” content.
The school, located in England, is now warning students at the beginning of its “Women in Homer” course they could “encounter views and content that they may find uncomfortable,” The Daily Mail reported.
It cites themes of rape, sexual violence, and infant mortality in the two poems.
Students who experience “distress” due to the poems’ contents should “feel free to deal with it in ways that help (e.g. to leave the classroom, contact Wellbeing, and of course talk to the lecturer),” the university said, according to information obtained by The Daily Mail.
A university spokesman told the newspaper that “content warnings ‘help ensure students who may be affected by specific issues are not subjected to any potential unnecessary distress.’”
However, a professor of humanities at Thales College in North Carolina told The College Fix the move undermines the role of higher education.
“The ‘trigger warnings’ are disguised forms of anticipatory censorship. They tell the students in advance that what they are going to read is in some way filthy or stupid or wicked or contemptible,” Anthony Esolen told The Fix. “Why you would want to teach what you despise is beyond me.”
Prestigious colleges such as the University of Exeter once “produced titans of learning in every field, explorers, inventors, ethnologists, missionaries, statesmen; now, by their own unwitting admission, they seek to produce over-touchy neurotics incapable of reading Homer without a pussycat to stroke and opioid cookies nearby,” he said.
The Fix reached out to the University of Exeter’s Press Office and English Department two weeks ago via email about the university’s intent with the trigger warnings, but received no response.
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Comments
Isn’t “some distress” an ordinary part of growing up?
Will it be provided by BBC Pidgin?
“Dey be homos heah!”
They tell the students in advance that what they are going to read is in some way filthy or stupid or wicked or contemptible
One thing I will say is that “content warnings” work so well for movies that kids use them to figure out which “restricted” things they want to see! Maybe if they did them right, those trigger warnings could get more people reading ancient Greek lit?
“Ooh! Let’s watch this one! It says, ‘smoking!'”
“You pervert!”
Pretty pathetic.
Cultural Ledas, all.
Well, that’s a problem for Future Homer.