I’m also very concerned, not about trigger warnings specifically (“you might want to give students a heads up that there’s a rape in this book” or “it might be worthwhile to remind them that this article is old and written from the perspective of someone who doesn’t consider slavery immoral” are the LEAST controversial part of this campus protest thing), but about… Nnn.
If I say that I am a radical leftist activist, and as such I am sickened and angered by my conservative professor’s support for a status quo that I believe is literally killing people like me, the professor is likely to just retort with “Not everyone is a radical leftist activist. You’re welcome to take my class, but I would not hold my views if I thought they got people needlessly killed. You can choose to learn from me, or choose to drop, but that is the choice you get.”
Whereas if I say “I have a mental health disorder, and as an accommodation, I need to not read these types of article that cause me this type of reaction,” then the professor not accommodating me becomes a matter of disability accommodation, and the professor is culpable for ignoring my request (as opposed to making a convincing argument that it’s unreasonable, or something.)
But my concern is that what’s happening with this campus stuff, or one thing that’s happening anyway, is people are using the rhetoric of access (and even more so the rhetoric of “creating hostile environments”) to force professors to do things in certain ways, even though their main issue is actually related primarily to politics and not to access.
It’s not that triggers are for weaklings, and it’s not that having PTSD shouldn’t influence people’s politics. It’s that I think people are *using medical sounding rhetoric* to make demands, when if they just said what they mean – “I have strong political opinions and because of them I believe that you are doing something inexcusably and culpably offensive” – people would rightly say “well, but I have a right to do that.”
