You don’t need a PhD to see that censorship thrives in universities. In the past few weeks alone, a professor has been banned from the University of Manchester and described as a ‘potential risk to colleagues’ for having allegedly used ‘the n-word’ in a disciplinary meeting; a sociology lecturer at Abertay University has been subjected to a smear campaign for inviting a speaker critical of Scotland’s rape laws; and pro-Palestinian student activists at City, University of London have called for the dismissal of a Jewish professor because he completed compulsory military service in Israel during the 1980s.
Professors at this august institution have placed trigger warnings on essays discussing free speech
You don’t need a degree of any kind to see that universities need more free speech, not less; and that students need encouragement to tolerate and challenge ideas they dislike, rather than having their censorious impulses validated. But this is exactly what is happening at the University of Essex. Professors at this august institution have placed trigger warnings on essays discussing free speech. Truly, academia is where irony goes to die.
Freedom of Information requests submitted by the Daily Telegraph reveal warnings have been slapped on five texts that discuss free expression and its potential limits. Israeli scholar Joseph Raz’s essay, Free Expression and Personal Identification, and American academic Joshua Cohen’s work, Freedom of Expression, Philosophy and Public Affairs, now come with warnings attached. So does an article about Sir Salman Rushdie and an essay by philosopher Jeremy Waldron. I must confess to never having read Liberalism and Campus Hate Speech by Professor Andrew Altman, but now that I know that academics at the University of Essex think students need to be warned about its contents, I’m keen to track down a copy.
The content warnings alert students to issues surrounding the ‘philosophical debates about hate speech and the potential limits of free speech’. At risk of killing the joke through explanation, eliding free speech with hate speech and warning students about the risks of philosophical debate, is just about the most un-free speech thing you can do. Wherever they pop up, trigger warnings are a first step towards censorship.
Trigger warnings act as a big red flag stuck at the top of a reading list. Listing all the potential harms that may result from reading a text tells already oversensitive students exactly what it is they should find offensive. The not-so-subtle message to wannabe young activists is that if they are not outraged by a flagged-up essay, then they are insufficiently virtuous. It begs the inevitable question: if a work is so potentially harmful, then why is it being recommended in the first place? Surely it is better to be on the safe side and remove the dangerous texts? Warn students about free speech one week, censor your reading list the next.
Trigger warnings infantilise students. Their very presence tells young adults they might not be able to cope with reading a book. Yet the practice of flagging up apparently risky ideas is spreading like a plague at the University of Essex. Undergraduates studying literature can expect to find warnings for ‘violence, slavery, racism, and suicide’ on texts including Hamlet, A Clockwork Orange and – another irony alert – Nineteen Eighty-Four. At Essex, Big Brother has your best interests at heart; he does not want you to feel uncomfortable in the presence of dystopian fiction. Binyavanga Wainaina’s How to Write About Africa is another text that comes with a warning, this time for ‘satire’ – even though it is a satirical book highlighting stereotypes. We can only hope that rebellious students see these warnings as a wicked incentive to read on.
The outbreak of trigger warnings at Essex comes despite the University having previously been rapped over the knuckles for cancelling lectures by two gender critical feminists, Professors Jo Phoenix and Rosa Freedman, following student protests in 2021. A review was undertaken, and an apology issued. Essex now claims to be ‘a university that values academic freedom and freedom of speech within the law.’ Of course it does. The devil is, however, in the detail. When free speech comes cloaked in warnings, it is hardly free speech at all.
Professors who inflame student outrage and lend credibility to calls for censorship turn universities into a bad joke.
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