The piece warns that the  growing institutionalization of aversion to presenting views that students may find offensive or disagreeable deprives students of the opportunity to confront views they disagree with. The professor engaged students in a discussion about opposing viewpoints on, among other things, transgender issues, prompting one student to file a Bias Incident Report with university administrators. As characterized in the student’s complaint, the professor argued that “transgender is not a real thing, and no one can truly feel like they are born in the wrong body.”

The Bias Response Team contacted the professor, who responded that he was simply playing devil’s advocate to encourage a discussion amongst his students. University administrators encouraged him to avoid doing so:

A member of the Bias Response Team met with the professor, the report says, and “advised him not to revisit transgender issues in his classroom if possible to avoid the students expressed concerns.” The Bias Response Team also “told him to avoid stating opinions (his or theirs) on the topic as he had previously when working from the Atlantic article.”

Another Bias Incident Report with a second professor followed, and you can read about it here. If you know of any similar “bias reporting systems” at your college or alma mater, please drop us a note.

Instead of learning skills and techniques to help people in need, we read thousands-upon-thousands of pages of material about “microagressions” and “microinsults,” often in “studies” that directly contradict each other. Instead of belonging to a community of generally like-minded, altruistic peers, we are all fragmented along every conceivable social fault line of identity politics, “social locations,” and “intersectionalities.” Instead of sharing what we know with each other, we often sit for hours in silence in classes so as not to risk offending anyone else in the slightest.

When I graduate, I fear that I will have no discernible, useful skills to use in the real world. What I will have is crippling debt. And an extensive vocabulary that I can use to label every slight and injury with staggering precision.

Another reader snarks, “Perhaps we should just give into these overly coddled college students by rewarding them with Participation Diplomas.” Reader S.G. presents a new angle:

Whether you oppose or support trigger warnings, I’ve rarely seen anyone address the impact they would have on classes where the curriculum is student submitted work.

Assuming trigger warnings are mandatory, what message does it send to young writers, painters, or musicians that they’ll need to provide advance notice of potentially troubling concepts in their work or risk academic punishment? Even if trigger warnings aren’t mandatory, it doesn’t seem much better to have a system where they’re “strongly encouraged” to the point not including them would be seen as a major social negative. We like to pretend the negative effects of peer pressure and social ostracizing are things we leave behind in high school. They’re not. They have weight.

Another reader, William Petersen, insists that the PC problem spans ideologies:

I have seen more “right leaning” local school boards dispense completely with history or science books that criticize the myth of American Exceptionalism, teach the Theory of Evolution, and/or try to re-write curriculum to fit certain Conservative or Christian presumptions of “what is appropriate” for young people, than I have liberal adjunct professors invoking trigger warnings to dampen right-leaning opinions in the lecture hall. The coddling, that Lukianoff and Haidt rightly criticize, is apolitical in many respects.

Another reader agrees:

Instructors do get some students from time to time who think they have the right not to have their sensibilities offended. This extreme orthodoxy emanates from both liberal AND conservative students.

This is not to suggest there is no such thing as “microagression,” but I think they are making a mountain out of a molehill. Some students are EXPLOITING this situation and creating an atmosphere of paranoia, sometimes because they simply don’t like the instructor, or worse, as a pre-emptive excuse for their own bad performance. I suspect some are just looking for an excuse to nail your ass with whatever tools are at their disposal. I have had these kinds of problems on four occasions— twice with black females, once with a gay male student, and once with two evangelicals in tandem.

I find the root of it is usually that they are disgruntled with their grades and want to punish YOU, so at bottom it’s really a kind of temper tantrum. They are spoiled brats and they know exactly what buttons to push. They can make your life a living hell and they know how to do it. This is the main reason I am retiring from academia.

But Greg Hom warns:

This trend to not allow speech is not confined to the academy by any means. When politicians try to disallow the words “global warming” or “climate change” in political discussion because it goes against their “beliefs,” they are contributing to this nonsense.

Another reader looks to literature and sees life imitating art:

In Ray Bradbury’s 1953 novella 451 Fahrenheit, he worried about society developing institutionalized restrictions on discussing difficult concepts such as race relations, sexual perversion, and political differences because they might hurt people’s feelings. The whole PC movement described in this cover story is a mirror of the speech that the “Fire Captain” made to Montag before he burnt the house with the hidden library of banned books. And the multiple screens on walls and in miniature in Montag’s house which enabled his insecure wife to be in constant touch with her “cousins” was Bradbury’s prescient vision of our overwhelming obsession in 2015 with Facebook and Twitter.

Another looks to advertising:

There’s an interesting article by The Last Psychiatrist that long-windedly examines the idea that Dove Soap’s “Real Beauty” campaign was not specifically crafted to answer any real questions about how we perceive beauty but instead to set up Dove as a voice of authority in that sphere. If we were arguing about Dove’s opinion on beauty, the author posits, it could only benefit Dove no matter which way the argument was settled because by discussing it were were making the assumption that Dove’s opinion mattered at all. By creating an argument, Dove set itself up as an important voice on beauty, which helped it sell soap. It’s hard to argue this wasn't effective.

In the case of campus PC, we see something similar but twisted into a new form. The administrations of the offending colleges could very easily settle the issue once and for all by simply rejecting the idea of microaggressions and by refusing to get involved in matters of free speech. “Discourse is important,” they could say, as everyone else does.

That the administration of these schools does not do so tells us something. They’ve set up a system where the students bring them complaints on a regular basis regarding the speech and actions of other students, and in those instances the school is expected to render a ruling on the particular instance of speech. It doesn’t matter what the issues are or how the school rules: the point is to condition the students into regarding the University as the authority on what speech and thoughts are acceptable.

This isn’t the University’s job, and the idea that we’ve allowed government-funded establishments to expand their power in this way should be objectionable to us.

Reader K.P. notes an example:

I went to a small private school, the University of Tulsa. The year after I graduated, they suspended (effectively expelled) a senior. His crime? His then-fiancé (a non-student) had written a rude Facebook post with some incendiary remarks about a faculty member and another student. The administration claimed the student didn’t act quickly enough to take down his fiancé's post and brought the rod of discipline down on his head. He lost tens of thousands of dollars and probably had his career prospects damaged over somebody else’s impolite speech.

Another reader criticizes a part of the cover story that hasn’t been noted yet:

In discussing disinvitation of campus speakers, Haidt and Lukianoff fret that Condoleezza Rice and Christine Lagarde were disqualified from sharing their perspectives. Not only have both of these powerful figures had more than ample opportunities to share their perspectives in the past, but commencement speeches are not public forums from which they are being barred. Instead, speakers are personally invited to confer advice to graduating students, however trite. If a majority of students do not wish to receive someone’s advice, they are free not to. Why seek advice from the abhorrent?

Yes, in the examples given above, the speakers would likely have had an encouraging word for females aspiring to powerful positions, but so would many others who happen not to be complicit in outright misdeeds. Is Dick Cheney free to continue to spout his self-aggrandizing evil over the airwaves? Sure, but we certainly don’t have to provide an audience for him.

Another reader takes a step back:

Up till now, I had been reluctantly moving towards giving up on The Atlantic; that it had fallen totally in thrall to the worship of every imaginable liberal piety, to the exclusion of all other sensibilities. So understand how thrilling it was for me to read this vigorous and well-reasoned broadside directed against the campus thought police, which basically accused the conjurers of all things PC to be suffering from mental illness, and to be endangering students with same.

Another felt differently:

I think this story was the final nail in the coffin for me for The Atlantic. I reread this a few times. I looked for the word ‘tenure’ to appear in the article. I did a text search. The word never appeared.

Tenure has been disappearing in the name of cost-cutting. There are some schools where the concept barely exists. You have adjunct professors, some with Ph.Ds, who are essentially in paycheck-to-paycheck, quarter-to-quarter jobs. The universities who employ them are increasing non-academic staff but cutting tenured professors. Adjunct professors don’t require health insurance. If they’re unpopular, they’re easy to fire.

To me, this is the real decline of American Minds. It’s shocking to me how such a basic principle seemed to escape the authors.

One more reader:

While I’m not American, I am a recent grad and it was interesting to read this essay and compare it with my own uni experiences. Many of the same issues are currently playing out here in New Zealand, though perhaps not to the same degree of absurdity. Great article, well written, interesting, informative, well researched. I was so impressed I even turned off adblock for The Atlantic website.

Thanks! Ads keep the lights on.

Thirty to forty years ago, I had plates of food thrown at me, I was thrown across rooms and kicked down stairs, I had a hunting rifle pointed at me in my home, along with many lesser offenses. The last straw was an attempted strangulation in my own bed.

I am also a beneficiary of CBT. At three different times in my life (late 30s, late 40s, mid 50s), I sought help from CBT therapists. Each time I stopped CBT, I thought I had worked through the trauma, the PTSD, and I was ready to face the world alone. Now and then, I would find myself amidst a discussion about domestic violence. Sometimes, but not always, a powerful reaction or flashback was triggered. When the flashbacks occurred too frequently, I sought CBT again. I learned that my irrational reactions meant I still had work to do.

About five years ago, I realized that talking about domestic violence no longer triggered even the least bit of anxiety. I felt I had finally put it behind me. (I do still have filled prescriptions for anti-anxiety drugs. Just in case.)

In response to reader V. Reish, I would like to say that I am concerned (as a mother) about the younger generation’s seeming display of “more psychological weakness.” I’m glad that no one of ANY generation is “ostracized for seeking help” any more. However, Greg Lukianoff’s point about “problems of comfort” makes an entrance here. It seems that ongoing and readily available CBT might make “psychological weakness” too comfortable and the client less motivated to truly face the fear (tolerate triggers in safe situations), do the hard work, and put it behind them.

And, to psychologist Becky Liddle, I would like to point out that the classroom IS a safe situation, similar to the situations in which many of my flashbacks were triggered.

I agree with the anonymous Ivy League instructor who mentioned she was raped.

I would rather read…and have…words wrack my soul than see books…containing stories just a little like mine, vanish from college classrooms. These are books we must read. These are conversations we must have. Not in spite of traumatized students, but because of us.

And: “It’s not just that VP prevents students from having to think about what upsets them; it’s that it prevents the most privileged students from having to think about what should upset them.”

Growth is always uncomfortable, often painful. Nothing worth it is ever easy. College doesn’t last forever. Sooner or later, everyone has to face the real world on his/her own. Life is difficult. Be emotionally prepared!

One more email from Jim Elliott, who recalls two spectacular stories on the subject of campus PC and plus ca change:

I found Lukianoff and Haidt’s essay a fantastic read. As a trained but not practicing clinical social worker, I found their use of CBT as an allegory for the use of trigger warnings inspired. I also agree wholeheartedly. Psychology Today has had a running theme on teaching young adults resilience since at least 2004 because of this very issue.

As a student at UC Davis from 1997-2001, I saw this coddling begin to take off. I spent a little less than two years on the staff of the university newspaper. On my first day at the paper, I found all of the newspaper stacks (they were distributed freely around campus) covered in ketchup with a sign claiming that the minority and LGBT community were decrying the paper’s “advocacy of violence” against them.

The paper’s crime? A popular satirical cartoon in the paper had run a strip wherein the hall on campus that housed the various African-American, Chicano, and so-forth studies programs was destroyed by an errant cruise missile that had been fired at Serbia. In the final frame, the chancellor was “quoted” as being relieved that nothing important had been destroyed.

The cartoon was a biting critique of the then-administration’s perceived lack of regard for such programs. The community’s response to that act of solidarity was to run wild-eyed, stage a sit-in, and demand justice for a “threat against their lives.” They did this, dramatically, by defacing every issue of the paper that day “with blood.”

The front-page story for that issue? A memorial for a student who had died. To this day, I wonder if any of those aggrieved students considered how their protest may have affected that girl’s friends and relatives.

* * *

Shortly after I departed the paper, David Horowitz (yes, that David Horowitz) ran a full-page advertisement “10 Reasons Why Reparations for Slavery Are Wrong.” It was, of course, intended to be inflammatory. It was also deeply stupid, but apparently the campus crusade for happy fluffy feelings was not willing to let its idiocy stand without challenging it with their own monumental acts of stupidity. The editor-in-chief of the UC Berkeley student-run newspaper apologized for running the ad. I was told she subsequently had a nervous breakdown after receiving calls from various prominent newspaper editors that she had no business being in journalism for doing so. The paper I had just left also apologized.

David Horowitz was invited by the Campus Republicans to speak and he accepted. I gleefully attended, mostly because the hot Republican chick I had a crush on asked me to go, but I wanted to see if his speech was as stupid as his ad. (It was.)

As aggravating as Horowitz was, he did not, to my mind, hold a candle to the aggravation of student protestors, led by the LEAD “slate” (short for Leadership, Empowerment, Activism, and Determination—a political "party" within the campus environment that dominated the associated student union. Their demands—no free speech for racists—were appalling. Their rudeness was embarrassing.

It was a relief when they staged their “walk out” before the Q&A session, letting the hall go quiet so a tall, unassuming African-American student could take the mic and politely demolish Horowitz in front of those of us who remained. If those loudmouthed boors demanding their recompense had remained and simply listened, they would have seen how a real adult handles a loudmouthed buffoon like Horowitz.

I have to agree with Lukianoff and Haidt: What are we teaching our young adults? Life comes with acrimony. You disagree with co-workers, with friends, with family, even with your spouse (or should I say spouses, lest I offend the divorced and polyamorous among us)?

I fear that in a seemingly-noble quest to avoid causing pain, we’ve lost a crucial interpersonal skill: charity. We are losing, it seems to me, the ability to assume someone’s fault is ignorance and assume intentional aggression instead. It would, perhaps, behoove us all to remember Hanlon’s Razor: “Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.”

At least we’d all be a lot less anxious.

As Becky Liddle pointed out, this argument hinges almost entirely on over-the-top examples that have, in most cases, more to do with overzealous campus administrators than they do with student requests. It’s an argument of what-ifs and slippery slopes, not of data. Yet when presented dissenting perspectives, Haidt pretends otherwise and defers to the “preponderance of researchers” in proving trigger warnings' malicious nature.

This seems intellectually dishonest. Lukianoff himself stated that trigger warnings were barely noted as late as 2014, yet we are to believe that there is already objective, research driven evidence against their usage?

To wit, Haidt links twice to a 2014 article by Pacific Standard that has tangential linkage at best to the issue of trigger warnings. The article describes incidence rates of PTSD (relatively high, and having PTSD is hardly the only prerequisite to wanting trigger warnings) and extolls the virtue of exposure therapy—which to be very clear, is nothing the same as a professor bringing up a traumatic topic in a lesson. The fifth study loosely correlates to trigger warnings in stating the dangers of victimhood-based identity, but basing an identity around trauma is hardly synonymous with the desire to avoid it outside of a therapist’s office. This is very unconvincing data that Haidt and Lukianoff use to invalidate lived perspectives.

Given this lack of data, Haidt and Lukianoff’s arguments boils down to telling students burdened with trauma or anxiety that their issues aren’t worth action that the teachers personally find useless. The professors know better, it seems, and look, we have studies and PhDs! It’s a paternalistic and frankly condescending argument that ignores basic rules of empathy.

The interaction between Haidt and reader V. Reish says it all. Reish passionately argues from his own life, stating:

Triggers are very real, most are incredibly easy to warn for, and they deal with brain disorders and phobias, not ‘challenging ideas.’ I’ve been triggered since age twelve... The term anxiety doesn't do justice to the brain-simulated heart attacks a bad triggering can induce. If you can spare someone that with a throwaway sentence, why wouldn’t you?

Haidt completely ignores this personal narrative and cooly shuts the matter down:

If there was clear evidence that trigger warnings actually helped these students to grow stronger and more independent, or even just to learn, then we’d be set up for a good conversation... But since the preponderance of researchers who have weighed in on the issue say that trigger warnings are likely to do more harm than good, I don’t think there is any reason to use them.

The researchers Haidt cites here (the aforementioned Pacific Standard article) are useless towards making his case, so why does he refuse to find clear evidence from another place: Reish’s life, perhaps, and the obvious implication that many students are just like him? Why insist that he knows better about a young person’s mental state and ability to cope with trauma than the young person themself? Haidt is so unwilling to perform a basic act of warning that it borders on edge of preposterous. He comes off almost indignant.

It’s relevant here to cite Lukianoff and Haidt’s intro to “emotional reasoning”:

[David D.] Burns defines emotional reasoning as assuming “that your negative emotions necessarily reflect the way things really are: ‘I feel it, therefore it must be true.’ ” Leahy, Holland, and McGinn define it as letting “your feelings guide your interpretation of reality.” But, of course, subjective feelings are not always trustworthy guides; unrestrained, they can cause people to lash out at others who have done nothing wrong. Therapy often involves talking yourself down from the idea that each of your emotional responses represents something true or important.

Emotional reasoning dominates many campus debates and discussions. A claim that someone’s words are “offensive” is not just an expression of one’s own subjective feeling of offendedness. It is, rather, a public charge that the speaker has done something objectively wrong. It is a demand that the speaker apologize or be punished by some authority for committing an offense.

Bickel also added “one final note”:

An alarming fact from the research Haidt twice cites is that 6 percent of women in America suffer from PTSD related to sexual assault. This is an incredible amount, and statistically counts for at least one student in every class Haidt and Lukianoff teach. Despite your few extreme examples, these thousands upon thousands of students came your college to learn, not to destroy your curriculum. It won’t crumble the educational edifice to warn them before discussing a topic that will cause extremely unpleasant associations. They just want to know when to schedule their therapy session.

Another reader, Erica Etelson, looks for a middle ground:

Apparently, some students want trigger warnings while others don’t. Perhaps professors can negotiate this by asking students who want trigger warnings to inform them at the beginning of the semester of what types of warnings they want and then provide one-on-one warnings to these students rather than to the entire class. It’s a bit of a burden on professors, but not as much of an intellectual burden as blanket trigger warnings.

Another reader recalls an instance where a middle ground was found:

During my sophomore year English class at a liberal arts college, the novel we were covering had a couple passages that were quite sexually explicit, so when the professor mentioned one day at the beginning of the class that we would be reading through part of the text, each student a paragraph, and then having a discussion, we were given an option to just say “pass.”

Of course, the paragraph that contained the main character pleasuring herself in a very extended and explicit way fell to me.  I had no problem with us studying the book, no contention with discussing it, but there was just something weird about sitting around and reading aloud such a passage among a group of semi-strangers.  My heart rate skyrocketed and I started sweating like crazy.  I didn’t want to be the prude, I didn’t want to be the weird dude throwing off the mojo of the class, and I didn't want to make the class more awkward than it already had become.

So just I said, “I’m not comfortable reading this,” and the professor happily did the duty for me, and then continued on with the student sitting next me.  Was that my own personal issues coming out and affecting the class?  Yep.  Would I probably just go ahead and read it now?  Probably.  But after the class the professor pulled me aside in private and said he respected my courage to say I was uncomfortable with the exercise and did not actively participate.  I felt respected, the subject was still covered without a big complaint to the dean, and six years later I’m probably a lot more comfortable with that type of material because it was handled so professionally.

Should students chill out about comedians like Chris Rock?  Absolutely.  Could professors find some middle-ground with their students by acknowledging that some material is going to be emotionally harder for some than others and still cover it?  I think on the vast majority of cases, they can.

Just about everything Borat said or did was offensive to PC sensibilities.  Of course everyone knew that this was a liberal, Jewish comedian playing on stereotypes. The common refrain: “The joke is on the people who don’t know who Sacha Baron Cohen really is.”

But I remember laughing hardest with my friends at the things Borat said, not at the idea that he was tricking people.

“In Kazakhstan we say that to give a woman a vote is like giving a monkey a gun: very dangerous!”  

“I arrived in America’s airport with clothings, US dollars, and a jar of gypsy tears to protect me from AIDS.”

These things are funny because they are offensive. I think it goes back to Freud’s conception of jokes. Borat is a character specifically designed to offend every cultural sensibility in the 21st century West.  He says things that most of us would never dream of saying, or want to.  But when he says them, it acts as a catharsis that cuts through the moral seriousness and tension our culture has built up around political correctness and culturally sensitivity.  

Caitlin Flanagan mentions the pitfall that occurs when a comedian’s jokes elicit “the hearty laugh from the person who understands your joke not as a critique of some vile notion but as an endorsement of it.” That’s certainly the danger of Borat’s kind of humor. But so long as it remains and is understood on the level of the ridiculous, it serves a necessary function in society.  Laughter is one of the primary valves our minds and bodies use to release built up tension.  When that valve is suppressed or cut off, neurosis is more likely to develop.

Throughout most of human history, comedians have understood this.  Their role is not just to critique social structures with humor but to allow the audience a venue in which to release social and mental tension through laughter. The danger of the PC climate on today’s campuses is it assumes that all “offensive” humor is intended in service of some vile notion.  That just isn’t true, and it’s intellectually dishonest to say that it is.  

A healthy community allows a forum in which its most austere and sacred ideas can be made fun of. That’s something today’s sensitivity police need desperately to understand.  

Have something to add to the debate over the new campus PC? Email hello@theatlantic.com.

This is the professor’s job. But quite often, trigger warnings are not used in an ideologically neutral way that would invite or allow all parties to the discussion to “drive more safely at higher speeds.” They are often used to tag material that the left finds offensive. This sets clear expectations about what kinds of ideas and speakers get to drive in the fast lane, and which speakers and ideas will be constantly stopped by the police.

Conservative and libertarian students often write to me to tell me how dispiriting it is to take part in a class where the professor is openly hostile to their ideas. They learn to keep quiet. Or to demand trigger warnings, or syllabus changes, as is now happening with the Fun Home controversy at Duke.

In our essay we wrote about the “offendedness sweepstakes” -- the race to the bottom as each side demands accommodation from the other. Once you start allowing anyone to demand a trigger warning for anything they find offensive, there is no end, and professors are likely to choose safer, blander readings. So trigger warnings are not simple road signs; they are an invitation to unending political turmoil and partisan anger.   

This article is a poorly conceived piece of pop-psychology trash. The situation described here is unrepresentative of anything I experienced at two liberal colleges. Further, the clear implication that my fellow mentally-ill students are creating their own problems so that they can be coddled is an ugly one, to put it nicely.

Triggers are very real, most are incredibly easy to warn for, and they deal with brain disorders and phobias, not “challenging ideas.” I’ve been triggered since age twelve. College changed nothing about that, and “tough love” or pretending them away didn’t either. The term anxiety doesn't do justice to the brain-simulated heart attacks a bad triggering can induce. If you can spare someone that with a throwaway sentence, why wouldn’t you?

People in the previous generation, including my father, had to internalize their disorders for fear of censure. If my generation displays more psychological weakness, look first to the reality that we're no longer ostracized for seeking help. If some people are abusing the concept, the right reaction is *not* to lump them together with the bulk of the students working through real and difficult mental health issues.

You’d never know it from anything in this email, but I really don't like joining the internet outrage-machine and haven’t posted an angry comment in about four years. But this article deserves to be called out bluntly. By recommending colleges actively discourage even the most common trigger warnings the authors are in effect encouraging professors to play exposure therapist, and advocating for a campus culture in which the deck is intentionally stacked against otherwise excellent students struggling with anxiety disorders. So at the risk of playing into accusations of self-parody: Yes, I am @#$%ing offended.

Haidt again:

I applaud the fact that so many students with mental illness now attend college when in past years they would not have been able to. I agree that university communities must work through ways to accommodate the needs of these students. If there was clear evidence that trigger warnings actually helped these students to grow stronger and more independent, or even just to learn, then we’d be set up for a good conversation about how to balance those benefits against the costs to other students from putting warnings on books.

But since the preponderance of researchers who have weighed in on the issue say that trigger warnings are likely to do more harm than good, I don’t think there is any reason to use them. I am not saying that professors should change what they do to become exposure therapists. I am saying that professors should not change what they do to take on the role of anti-exposure therapists.

Becky Liddle in Toronto emails her expertise:

As a psychologist, I am concerned that the article often seems to lump together the clearly over-the-top extreme examples with reasonable trigger warnings about content related to genuine PTSD, such as rape, incest, violence against women, etc.

The authors say that CBT encourages PTSD sufferers to expose themselves to triggering stimuli to get over the PTSD, which is true, but CBT does that in an extremely gradual and predictable way, within a safe environment, often with the support and guidance of a therapist. That is completely different from being required to read a short story for English class that contains a graphic description of rape that may cause flashbacks or other retraumatization.

Have trigger warnings sometimes gone too far? Absolutely. But let’s not throw out the proverbial baby with the bathwater. Let’s throw out the ridiculous stuff, but continue to be sensitive, at a minimum, to students who suffer from genuine, clinical trauma.

Haidt once again:

I can see that trigger warnings would help some people, in the short run, to avoid painful memories. If there were evidence that trigger warnings were helpful in the long run then I would be much more sympathetic to their use in the limited way that Ms. Liddle suggests. But Greg and I think that the case is much stronger that in the long run, the use of trigger warnings is bad for people who have suffered trauma. Until we see some evidence that trigger warnings are beneficial, we are opposed to a practice that teaches all students to fear any books or ideas.

Something you want to add to the debate that you haven’t seen thus far? Email hello@theatlantic.com. Update from reader Samantha C.:

A reader brought up the movie rating system, and Haidt commented: “This protective attitude must end at some point in life; Greg and I believe that it should end by age 18.” I think this hits at a core disconnect between some of the people conversing here.

I’m 26, and I pay close attention to movie ratings, especially in one genre or another. I have no kids and am in no supervisory capacity over kids. But I like to choose, for myself, what I'm up for handling. If I know that a horror movie is rated R, I get to choose whether I want to take the risk of seeing R-rated violence, gore, sex or cursing. This might mean that I’m all for it and go in prepared. This might mean that I wait for another day, because right now I’m not up for it. It may mean that I skip the movie or wait for a TV release.

But having those choices and preparations available doesn’t mean that
I’m treating myself as a child, which seems to be the logical conclusion of Haidt’s opinion. I’m pretty sure I’m not the only adult who uses
movie ratings and other warnings to make decisions for myself. Which,
frankly, is more empowering than being told that I ought to just be
able to take anything that comes at me at any given moment because I’m an adult.

In 2007, Brandeis University professor Donald Hindley, a nearly 50-year veteran of teaching, was found guilty of racial harassment after a student complained to administrators that Hindley discussed the word “wetbacks” in his Latin American politics class. Hindley was discussing the phrase in order to explain its origins and criticize its use, yet he was found guilty without a hearing and without even knowing the specific allegations against him, and the school placed an administrative monitor in his classes.

As for the question of how common trigger warning policies are, it’s important to note how sudden the explosion of trigger warnings in the popular consciousness has been, let alone the idea of implementing trigger warning policies.

I think one of the defining events that pushed campus trigger warnings into the spotlight was in 2014 when Mireille Miller-Young, a feminist-studies professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara, assaulted pro-life student protesters and stole and destroyed their signs. When questioned by the UCSB Police Department, Miller-Young used the justification that “she felt ‘triggered’ by the images” on the posters. Just a few months before the incident, I and many others who work in the field of higher education had never even heard of the term “trigger warning.”

The first time the notion of a campus trigger warning policy truly caught the public eye may have been when Oberlin College released its 2014 policy advising faculty to remove triggering material when it didn’t “directly” contribute to learning goals and to “strongly consider” developing a policy to make “triggering material” optional. The Oberlin policy was tabled after it received faculty backlash, but a student at George Washington University wrote an op-ed defending the policy and recommending that the GWU Faculty Senate consider implementing a similar one. Things came full circle in the spring of 2014 when the student senate at UC Santa Barbara passed a resolution calling for mandatory trigger warnings on course syllabi.

Because the controversy surrounding trigger warnings is so new, there’s not much hard data out there about it. The National Coalition Against Censorship recently helped the College Art Association and the Modern Language Association administer an online survey to their members to gauge trigger warning use. Although the study provides some interesting insights (more than half of respondents had at least once voluntarily provided students with trigger warnings), the groups stress that the survey is unscientific. Trigger warning use on campus is certainly something that needs to be studied more in the future, and we’d love to see more data as well.

But as noted by an earlier, I am an old man, having graduated from law school way back in 2000, so I asked my research assistant, Haley Hudler, who graduated from a small liberal arts college in 2013, about her experiences with trigger warnings:

While in college, I took a variety of humanities classes, including several women’s studies and gender studies classes where we discussed sensitive topics like sexual assault, abortion, and genital mutilation. Although I had several professors acknowledge that we would be discussing challenging material, I never once heard the phrase “trigger warning” or “triggering” from any faculty or any of my fellow students.

The first time I saw the phrase “trigger warning” was nearly a year after I graduated, when a then-current student used it when sharing an article about campus sexual assault on Facebook. I had to look the phrase up on Urban Dictionary. When I talk about trigger warnings with fellow 2013 grads, many have never heard of them and struggle to understand the concept. Those who are familiar with trigger warnings generally do not remember hearing the phrase used during our time on campus.

However, when I shared Greg and Jon’s article with current students at my alma mater, I was intrigued by not only how many rushed to defend trigger warnings but also how many consider them a common courtesy. I think this is what explains why trigger warnings have been generating so much discussion and debate— people are mystified by how quickly they are gaining prevalence on campuses. The fact that just two years removed from campus a phenomenon most of my fellow students did not even know existed has become a practice many consider a matter of basic decency is fascinating.

The NCAC’s recent survey on trigger warnings found that 13 percent of professors said they had received requests from students for trigger warnings. About 11 percent said students in their classes had complained to them or to administrators about their failure to use trigger warnings. Some might argue that these percentages sound too small to indicate a campus trend, but when you take into account how low those percentages likely were just two years ago, it does seem that this is indeed a rapidly growing campus practice.

Indeed, campus trigger warnings appear to be a very new phenomenon, but are already becoming widespread. Just by doing a simple Google search we were able to find trigger warnings appearing even on policies related to how you file and adjudicate a Title IX claim at schools including Swarthmore College, Brandeis University, and Tufts University. If students are already being warned that policies about sexual harassment involve discussion of, well, sexual harassment, we might want to ask ourselves what we mean by the term “trigger warning” in the first place.

Can you think of more examples? Email hello@theatlantic.com and I’ll post any substantiated ones.

In the article we cite a letter written by seven humanities professors who said their colleagues were being called on by administrators investigating student complaints that they had included “triggering” material in their courses, with or without trigger warnings. The professors’ main concern was that professors couldn’t possibly anticipate everything that might upset students, no matter how many warnings they administered or how they adjusted their course materials.

If Mr. Needelman is saying that professors should be able to handle criticism, I absolutely agree. But it’s not mere criticism these professors fear. They aren’t worried about getting their feelings hurt; they fear for their jobs.

This is not an irrational, hypothetical fear. In hundreds of cases I have seen in my work, dozens of which are recounted in my book Unlearning Liberty, I’ve seen professors get in trouble for clearly protected speech related to the content of their courses. They’re not being paranoid to be concerned about the consequences of offending.

In 2011, University of Denver professor Arthur Gilbert was suspended and found guilty of sexual harassment after two anonymous students filed complaints about the sexualized nature of his course on the history of America’s drug wars, a course that quite explicitly included several sections on taboo sexual themes.

And just last week, Alice Dreger resigned her professorship at Northwestern’s Feinberg School of Medicine, citing continuing censorship by the University, specifically its ongoing censorship of the faculty-produced medical journal Atrium, of which Dreger is an editor. These are just a couple of the cases I’ve seen where professors had to worry about their job security after engaging in clearly protected speech.

As for Mr. Needelman’s recharacterization of what Jerry Seinfeld said about performing on campuses, I think he’s missing the crux of the argument Seinfeld and his fellow comedians are making. I am an executive producer of an upcoming documentary called Can We Take Joke?, in which we interview a half-dozen major comedians about the problems comedy faces on campus and in general. The comedians who say they don’t want to play campuses are not saying that they’re afraid of going on campus— they’re saying it’s a pretty lame experience because students are so quick to claim offense.

As Chris Rock said in a 2014 interview, “This is not as much fun as it used to be.” I don’t think Chris Rock is afraid of anyone, but if you’re getting the impression that some students will intentionally misinterpret your jokes and not even allow you to be, as Rock says, “offensive on your way to being inoffensive,” we should consider what kind of environment we’ve created.

Can you imagine Chris Rock doing a comedy bit like the following one on a college campus today? (NSFW, because Chris Rock):

Want the last word here? Email hello@theatlantic.com and I’ll update the post with your best counterpoints. And to keep track of the whole ongoing debate on the new campus P.C., head here.

His father fought in both World War I and the Russian Revolution (he was evacuated in the Crimea on a British hospital ship while in a typhoid-induced coma), horrors I can barely imagine. His grandfather was a serf, a piece of owned property living in what would today be considered the grossest poverty. And they did all of this without media to distract them, without antidepressants, and even without aspirin or penicillin.

My point is that it’s pretty likely that your grandmother and grandfather, like mine, did in fact have it a lot harder than you do, and they learned a lot from those challenges. They lived in the daily presence of disease, death, back-breaking labor, and violence, whereas we live in what scholars like Steven Pinker have called the most peaceful and nonviolent period in human history. As a result, your grandmother and grandfather would likely see colleges’ efforts to protect students from offensive or disturbing content as not only an unnecessary luxury, but also harmful, as they know full well that they and those who came before them learned from the challenges they faced.

Growing abundance and comfort are undoubtedly good things, but they do come with consequences. These consequences are what I call “problems of comfort,” an idea I elaborate on in my short book Freedom From Speech. For example, political polarization is a “problem of comfort,” as it is the product of societal improvements like increased mobility, which has allowed people to move to like-minded neighborhoods, and availability of media, which allows people to get their information from news sources tailored to fit their preexisting worldviews.

Similarly, political correctness and the new “vindictive protectiveness” we discuss in the article arose from a good thing: a desire to be more sensitive, particularly towards the vulnerable. What we are examining in the article is whether these well-intentioned efforts have created their own problems: increased anxiety, depression, and an inability to entertain opposing viewpoints.

To say that progress does not sometimes create new problems is to be blind to history. And examining history and where these new problems came from so we can remedy them is why it can be valuable to listen to the “grumpy old man.” Indeed, that’s a piece of wisdom your grandmother probably could’ve told you.

Sebastian then wrote, unrelated to Lukianoff’s reply:

If you try to think about the history of our species as whole, it does not take long to come to the realization that the overwhelming majority of human life is a cry for help that no one hears. It is war, slavery, and genocide. It is massive and entrenched and unending. It is a cry made by a voice that, yes, is very often emotional, irrational, overgeneralizing, and catastrophizing.

That is the Real Problem. We too often forget it. If young people are more tuned in to the unfathomable suffering going on each day, if we are quicker to remind each other of that suffering, if we have not yet become callous to that suffering, then that is a good thing, and I really hope no young people lose that instinct after reading “The Coddling of the American Mind.”

Because, in case you can’t remember what it feels like to grow up in this world, it’s pretty painful and discouraging. It is the pain of growing up to learn about the patterns of oppression in the world and then experience them, experience young people like ourselves reincarnating the ancient hatreds. It was our collective heart breaking for the first time when we heard the Yale fraternity members walking through the streets chanting “No means Yes, Yes Means Anal!” It was the death of our dreams to realize that millions of Redskins fans gleefully chant a racial slur that invaders used to describe the victims of their genocide.

Mr. Lukianoff and Mr. Haidt, it is condescending, patronizing, and insulting to compare the collective suffering and anxieties of all young people to the irrational fear of elevators. To many, the fear is not misplaced. The suspicion is justified. The dangers in this world are very real, and I do not see how your article or the cause behind it will do anything to remedy that.

There’s quite of chasm between the “ancient hatreds” of “war, slavery, and genocide” and the reprehensible chanting of frat boys or the name of a sports team. There’s something really troubling about invoking them so tightly together.

Disagree? Want the last word on this note? Email hello@theatlantic.com. And to keep track of the entire ongoing debate, here’s the link to our thread page.

They make me into a one-dimensional caricature of someone so fragile and innocent that my psyche must be protected at all costs. Worse yet, they assume that people like me aren’t mature enough to see the difference between “microaggressions” that are unintentional and thoroughly harmless, and the ones that are harmful.  They also assume that people like me aren’t capable of withstanding and countering the latter. We most certainly are. I’m a capable adult who can deftly navigate the arrows of negativity and discrimination aimed at the LGBT and Latino communities without my nannies protecting me.

As to the “trigger warnings” for provocative works of art and literature, this is also a very sad state of affairs. I tend to think the more provocation, the better.

Some of the best works of art, in my opinion, are those of Francis Bacon and Egon Schiele because they leave me with heightened anxiety. I was especially disconcerted to read that Mrs. Dalloway, one of the best novels ever written in the English language, had been given the trigger warning treatment at Rutgers. I read that book for the first time during the depths of a depression that lasted months. But despite the difficulties, I kept reading because the very mental state that that novel explored was the one I was experiencing. Reading that novel while in that frame of mind was one of the most eye-opening and marvelously creative things I have ever done. So to deny college students such life-enhancing engagement with art simply to “protect” them from their own feelings is a travesty.

I hope there is a thorough and sustained backlash against this new political correctness. I agreed with the general goals of the PC movement of the 1980s and 1990s; there needed to be more points of view from historically marginalized peoples in classroom discussions and materials. But I am in deep opposition to this new and more frightening iteration.

What do you think? Email hello@theatlantic.com. The authors of the cover story, Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff, will be responding to critical emails from readers soon.

(Image via Dan Savage)