... to think we can extend this list a lot? Surely almost every book and film could have a content warning for something?

[Gasp0deTheW0nderD0g]

The Times today reports that ^universities have started removing books from reading lists to protect students from “challenging” content and have applied trigger warnings to more than 1,000 texts, a Times investigation has found.
Ten universities, including three from the Russell Group, have withdrawn books from course study lists, or made them optional, in case they cause students harm. The texts include the 2017 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Underground Railroad, by Colson Whitehead, which has been “removed permanently” from a course reading list at Essex University because of concerns about graphic depictions of slavery.^

There are many serious and obvious things to say about this, but they're all in the article. The aspect that engaged me is that it gives the list in full. I am certain we could help out the university sector by pointing out other potentially distressing books.

Here are some of the examples:

The Ancient Mariner, S. T. Coleridge University of Greenwich Content warning: Animal death, human death, supernatural possession

Persuasion, Jane Austen Aberdeen Portrays views of gender and class identity that are rooted in the context of early nineteenth-century England

The Waste Land, TS Eliot Aberdeen Contains references to death and war

The Iliad, Homer Highlands and Islands Violent close combat

Oliver Twist, Charles Dickens Royal Holloway Child abuse

Kidnapped, Robert Louis Stevenson Aberdeen Kidnapping [No! I'd never have guessed it would cover this subject]

The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, Agatha Christie Greenwich Contains murder [What! Shocked, I tell you, shocked]

And my favourite: The Bible York Shocking sexual violence

www.thetimes.co.uk/article/339af864-17ce-11ed-b1f4-627a202c7457 (Sorry, I don't have a share token for the article, but you can read it for nothing by signing up with your email address. That way you get to read a few free articles every month.)

So, what are your suggestions of content warnings for university students?

Here's mine:
The Very Hungry Caterpillar - contains description of an eating disorder and consequent physical discomfort

This is one of those things certain sections of the media seem to be obsessed with but I just can't muster up the same outrage.

It's one thing for books to be outright banned but courses change selected readings all the time, and good literature will prevail beyond the classroom anyway.

Winnie the Pooh. Shows worrying depression among the donkey community.
Swallows and Amazons. Children in boats with no lifejackets
Wuthering Heights. Familial discord, ghostly self harming, likely to trigger images of Kate Bush in alarming top register notes

in fact, just about anything ever published.

How times have changed. I had a module on my English literature degree for which Naked Lunch was required reading.

Running the country is what we’re training AI to do …

They wrote an article that makes it sound like universities across the country are removing hundreds of books but that just isn't true. Since it's behind a paywall, everyone just relies on the headlines and the summary tweets that don't explain the actual data.

"They submitted 300 FOIs and found evidence that two books had been removed from reading lists. But they went ahead and wrote the story they had decided to write anyway... The piece also contradicts almost every piece of evidence it provides in support of the story — if you read on long enough, it turns out the University of Essex actually removed The Underground Railroad from one module because another book was better-suited to the course." twitter.com/tpgcolson/status/1557277139413630976

oopsfellover

My point is that nearly all literature and art can be 'challenging' to 21st C folk. Try reading Wuthering Heights!! Very tough, very sadistic - and truly shocking even today. In art - think of the scenes of cruelty which are pretty much stock-in-trade for the Old Masters. I cannot look at Breughel's Massacre of the Innocents, for example. It's powerful stuff and it's meant to upset us sometimes - and it's OK to be upset. If we weren't - that would be a worry.

Yes, of course you would treat school students with due consideration for their youth and lack of life experience. But for the rest of us, university students included, there are such things as blurbs and synopses, surely, if you're very shockable. I count myself as shockable - and there are bits of literature which have had a profound effect on me. But I'd be insulted if someone tried to 'prepare' me for them. My own teachers (and I, when I was teaching) would tell the students what a book was about before starting to study it - it's part of the process and common sense to do that. But there is a difference now, I think, whereby adults are treated as little children who must be protected. It's particularly ironic, as a PP said, when you bear in mind the horrendous (to me) stuff that youngsters choose to expose themselves to in terms of violence, sex and aggressive language.

It's OK to say fuck and cunt on TV but a massive fuss is made about other words. I'm not too bothered by the f and c words in the context of a really good drama, but I do see the irony here - that's now OK, and other (until now perfectly good) words are taboo. While not minding the 'swearing' so much myself, I do see that making a fuss over other words (eg gender specific ones, not racially abusive ones) is very ironic. I don't have a problem with fashionable people choosing to use, say 'actor', when talking about Judi Dench, but vetoing the use of the word 'actress' is going too far.

It’s no big deal, just an advance acknowledgment that some people might find the themes difficult because of their personal experience

Oopsfellover so what happens if your students do find these themes difficult? Do you abandon the text and find something else?

The Times article is a load of bollocks, as givemushypeasachance posted. Designed to get people frothing over nothing. Also handy for the Tories as it gives the media something to grill ministers about rather than the real issues.

Why do people fall for this shite?

Meanwhile, the same pathetically fragile, emotionally stunted students are downloading violent porn and staying up until 5am playing Call of Duty online.

I don't know that these are the same groups of students

Of course it wasn't there 20 years ago, the whole concept of 'safe spaces', removing books in case they cause anxiety and all the other crap is breeding a generation of whimps who can't face anything because they've never had to. Many TV programmes now have a 'warning' about being 'upsetting to some people', if you're that easily 'upset' don't watch Midsomer Murders etc, dimwit.

Nor should a teenage girl be waving her undergarment at a train!

People fall for it because everyone likes feeling superior to the generations that came after them. "In my day we were made of stronger stuff!"

The Times probably submitted thousands of freedom of information requests and happened to find a handful of books out of hundreds of lit courses that were dropped for vague reasons and has made a front page story out of it.

Personally I'd have gone with the news that blackouts are being considered in January, but that's just me.

😂😂😂

Personally I'd have gone with the news that blackouts are being considered in January, but that's just me

Exactly. Diversionary tactics to keep the plebs' attention off the real issues.

Peepo

graphic scenes of war and lack of indoor plumbing

Not to mention doggies in doorways who shouldn’t be there!

Didn't I read recently that something that was named after Dick Turpin has had parents demanding it be renamed Richard Turpin to protect their sprogs?

The father in S and A would be on some Social Services naughty step for “Better drowned than duffers, if not duffers won't drown.”, one of my favourite quotes about child rearing!

😂😂😂

ClaudineClare · Today 11:58
Personally I'd have gone with the news that blackouts are being considered in January, but that's just me

Exactly. Diversionary tactics to keep the plebs' attention off the real issues.

Personally, (what with all the decades and degrees and letters after my name,) I’m more than capable of reading an article in The Times, drawing my own conclusions, engaging with a humorous MN thread on the subject and keeping a critical eye on national affairs …

Also, the whole concept of the hole in the page. It gives you a glimpse of the page ahead but who knows? There might be untold horrors hidden around the sides!

I'm honestly not saying this to be argumentative (for once!) but there is this assumption that uni students are soft and middle class and from sheltered backgrounds where they've never been exposed to anything horrible. In reality it's the opposite: trigger warnings are there primarily to protect students from severely traumatic backgrounds, and in my experience it's mainly those students asking for them.

Yeah okay it's obviously laughable to TW Agatha Christie as containing murder, and Ancient Mariner being TW "supernatural possession" made me laugh, but why should a teenage girl who's been raped and is suicidal be forced to read graphic depictions of rape? Or a child war refugee read about battles and massacres?

I studied comparative literature which was King Lear and a modern re-telling called A Thousand Acres. I'd read King Lear before and was fine with it. I didn't know until I was halfway through that A Thousand Acres is all about incest and a dad raping his daughters, and as an incest survivor living alone in a bedsit with (at then undiagnosed) clinical depression and PTSD and without any support, being forced to read a book about incest really fucked me up and did a lot of damage to the point it made me start self-harming for the first time. I wish I'd been told ahead of time that it was specifically about incest. Nothing to do with being a "snowflake" since King Lear is far more violent and graphic.

My study partner at uni was another mature student who'd come to the UK as a refugee and worked at the Foreign Office as an interpreter, and because of the languages she spoke, most of her work was translating testimony from torture and genocide survivors. She asked to have one of her set texts (an autobiography from one of the Beirut hostages) changes because it was too overwhelming and close to home.

Personally, (what with all the decades and degrees and letters after my name,) I’m more than capable of reading an article in The Times, drawing my own conclusions, engaging with a humorous MN thread on the subject and keeping a critical eye on national affairs …

Show off 😁

And definitions of words. It's very triggering to know what words mean, you know.

It's a bullshit story anyway though. As this twitter thread explains: twitter.com/tpgcolson/status/1557277139413630976

TL:DR: only 2 books were removed from reading lists - our of 300 FOI requests - and in the case of the Unerground Railroad it's because they found a book on slavery that was better suited to the course.

So it's basically a front page story on one single book being removed to sensitivies. I guess they really wanted to make the drudgery of all those FOI requests worth it.