AAUP Opposes Trigger Warnings

A subcommittee of the American Association of University Professors has drafted and approved a statement opposing the use of trigger warnings in the classroom. The document supports academic freedom and takes the following position:

The presumption that students need to be protected rather than challenged in a classroom is at once infantilizing and anti-intellectual. It makes comfort a higher priority than intellectual engagement and--as the Oberlin list demonstrates--it singles out politically controversial topics like sex, race, class, capitalism, and colonialism for attention. 

Indeed, if such topics are associated with triggers, correctly or not, they are likely to be marginalized if not avoided altogether by faculty who fear complaints for offending or discomforting some of their students. Although all faculty are affected by potential charges of this kind, non-tenured and contingent faculty are particularly at risk. In this way the demand for trigger warnings creates a repressive, “chilly climate” for critical thinking in the classroom.

Read the complete "On Trigger Warnings" (August 2014).

The Moral Dimension of Info Literacy

In a new Library Journal post, Barbara Fister discusses the tension between digital resources and the values important to librarians:

"When we fall into the trap of spending 50 minutes helping students learn how to find sources, as if acquiring and displaying them is the point of research, we imply that knowledge is other people’s property, procured and exchanged but not influenced by the student’s own life experience, thoughts, or beliefs. [Paulo] Freire believed that education should instead be 'the means by which men and women deal critically and creatively with reality and discover how to participate in the transformation of their world.' . . .

"Our teaching practices should present libraries as more than the Bank of Sources, from which usable phrases can be withdrawn as needed. They should be workshops, labs, studios, or hacker spaces, where students engage with ideas and invent their own, through conversation with others interested in the same things. They should be places where students develop their own identities as they learn the critical habits that civil society requires."

Check out the full article for several complementary publications that inform her thinking.