It is freshers’ week on campus. Brand new students get to make friends, get drunk and find their way around university. The excitement culminates with freshers’ fair, a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to find your tribe by joining everything from the paragliding club to the Mao appreciation society. Who cares if you never attend a single meeting? For one brief moment, you can flirt with the person you might become.
Freshers’ fairs offer new students a glimpse of the intellectual and political possibilities on offer at university. But sadly not at Oxford. This year, Oxford University’s freshers’ fair comes with a big fat trigger warning. Apologies. I should of course have prefaced that sizeist statement with ‘Trigger Warning: body shaming.’ And to be totally accurate, it is not one big fat trigger warning on the whole fair but a multitude of little warnings, one for each stall deemed to be promoting activities or ideas those in charge think new students might find distressing.
It is unlikely to be the bungee jumping club or the competitive vodka-drinking society that gets slapped with a trigger warning. It is not physical risks that students are being advised to avoid but emotional distress. The fashion for warnings has taken off following a row over the presence of an anti-abortion, pro-life group at last year’s fair.
This is peer-to-peer censorship by young adults firmly wedded to a perception of themselves as mentally and emotionally vulnerable
Whatever your view on abortion, the application of a trigger warning suggests that the mere presence of pro-life campaigners is potentially so distressing that students should steer clear altogether. But what is the point of a university if not to confront difficult ideas? Presumably, medical students need to think about how they might counsel pregnant women; philosophy students may ponder the point at which human life begins and history students might look at how women’s rights have changed over time. Badging these topics as potentially distressing helps no one.
The focus on anti-abortion campaigners reveals the political motivation that lies behind trigger warnings. Whatever the rhetoric, they have nothing to do with protecting people suffering from trauma. Repeated studies have shown that trigger warnings are not only ineffective but may actually be counterproductive when it comes to helping psychologically vulnerable students. But they continue to be useful for activists who want to flag up people or ideas they consider politically dangerous. Trigger warnings highlight challenges to the current consensus on campus.
Spraying trigger warnings around universities like disinfectant has a devastating impact on free speech. Students learn that university is not a place for exploring ideas but a place to be protected from anything controversial. They learn that debate is not an exciting chance to hone your arguments or change your mind, but something best avoided for your own emotional safety.
With this in mind, Oxford’s freshers’ fair also has a ‘wellbeing zone’ where students who feel ‘uncomfortable’ can go to relax and chat with members of the ‘advice and wellbeing team’. Presumably there will be colouring books, bean bags, milk and cookies. This is not university but play school.
I have been writing about campus censorship for more than a decade. Back at the start, I was at pains to point out that few students arrived at university itching to no-platform controversial speakers or sign petitions to have books removed from the library. I argued it was activist academics and university administrators who taught students to see themselves as vulnerable and ideas as dangerous.
Things have changed since then. Often, it is the students’ unions, like the one at Oxford, that are now pushing for trigger warnings. The freshers’ fair organisers have justified their plans on social media, explaining that they are no longer able to ban societies outright because of freedom of speech legislation. We can only imagine their frustration. The trigger warnings, then, are a ‘mitigation’ put in place ‘to support the welfare of students’.
It is now students who want to stick red flags on ideas they find distasteful. This is peer-to-peer censorship by young adults firmly wedded to a perception of themselves as mentally and emotionally vulnerable and in need of psychological protection from dangerous ideas. The form-wielding bureaucrats and rainbow lanyard-clad lecturers can stand down. Their work is complete.
In truth, students’ unions have always attracted busybodies wanting to boss their fellows into organised activities and carefully-controlled fun. The difference is that today, their main concern safeguarding the fragile mental health of their peers and opposing political views they find distressing. We have to hope that Oxford’s latest intake will ignore the trigger warnings and turn the wellbeing zone into a space for ferocious debate.
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