Trinity Joins the National Debate on Safe Space and Trigger Warnings

By Katie Groke

Trinity University has joined the national debate on safe space in educational settings, which has been a contested topic recently in higher education and beyond.

On March 29, the Collaborative on Learning and Teaching hosted a closed discussion for 19 students, faculty, and staff members to discuss trigger warnings and safe spaces.

The purpose of the meeting was to discuss some guidelines for creating a safe environment in classrooms. The main points of the guideline include creating a conducive interactive environment, expecting participants to be active listeners, respectful of other people’s opinions, and “accept other people’s experiences as the truth.”
The last point regarding truth was debated among the meeting participants, as some pointed out that truth is not something that can be assumed on a universal level.

One key issue discussed at the meeting was trigger warning, used in classrooms to prevent students from strong and adversarial reactions to class content due to past trauma.

Participants were asked to rate statements about trigger warnings and safe spaces by positioning themselves on a human barometer scale, meaning they move to different parts of the room depending on if they strongly agree, strongly disagree, or somewhere in the middle.

Overall there was a general understanding that safe spaces and trigger warnings were at times necessary. But some professors argue against implementing protections in the classroom, echoing arguments in the national debate.

In a letter to Inside Higher Ed magazine, seven Humanities professors argued against the implementation of trigger warnings. They state in the letter that professors cannot predict what content will be traumatic for students and therefore cannot cater to every student’s sensitivities. They also argue that professors are not trained in how to handle traumatic reactions and that students should be directed to health and counseling services on campus.

For the same reason, however, Katie Blevins, professor of communication at Trinity University and a 2006 Trinity graduate, argues that trigger warnings should be used in the classroom.

Blevins teaches classes about gender and race in the media and knows that these topics can be a trigger for some of her students. She tries to limit the chances of her causing a PTSD flashback by using trigger warnings.

"I am not trained in counseling, not psychology; [professors] are not trained,” she said. If an episode of PTSD took place during class, “it is traumatizing for me as a faculty member.”

For these classes with difficult topics, Blevins spends the first week of class explaining the kind of content that will be addressed in the course and that students are allowed to leave class if class content is traumatic for them.

Students in her class have said that she did a good job creating a safe space for them to discuss sensitive topics in class.

Still, Blevins holds a very different opinion compared with some other higher education institutions regarding the issue.

In May 2015, Columbia University rejected some students’ call for requiring trigger warning in all classes, arguing that they want to uphold academic and intellectual freedom for their professors, rather than serving as “thought police,” says Roosevelt Montás, an administer at Columbia University, quoted in the Washington Post.

In California, a Crafton Hill College student complained that there should be a warning about language, sex, and violence in graphic novels such as Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi and Fun House by Alison Bechdel.

There have also been requests for trigger warnings on classic literature like F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby on grounds that the novel is misogynistic and violent, as well as Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, for its themes of colonialism, racism and religious persecution, according to an article published The Atlantic.

Even President Obama has chimed in, stating that he thinks trigger warnings detract for educational experiences. In September 2015 he was quoted in The Hill saying that, “Anybody who comes to speak to you and you disagree with, you should have an argument with them. But you shouldn’t silence them by saying, you can’t come because I’m too sensitive to hear what you have to say. That’s not the way we learn, either.”

Robyn Wheelock, a junior at Trinity, would disagree. “I think that classrooms should absolutely be safe spaces for everybody because if we don’t feel safe, how are we supposed to learn?”

Safe space is a term stemmed from the 1960s and 1970s feminist movements and is meant to allow people to feel safe in expressing themselves in regards to their gender identity, sexual identity, race, physical or mental ability, and cultural background. The term has since been adopted by educational institutions to demonstrate that they will not tolerate hate speech or intolerance towards members of the LGBTQ community and other members on campus.

Recently, campuses across the United States are in debate about how much weight professors should give to trigger warning in syllabi and during classroom teaching.

Trinity University has now joined this debate and will continue discussion with students, faculty, and administration to see what action the university may need to take.