The UC-Santa Barbara Trigger Triggers an Article in the NY Times

Warning: The Literary Canon Could Make Students Squirm

NY Times, 5-17-14 Jennifer Medina

Should students about to read “The Great Gatsby” be forewarned about “a variety of scenes that reference gory, abusive and misogynistic violence,” as one Rutgers student proposed? Would any book that addresses racism — like “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” or “Things Fall Apart” — have to be preceded by a note of caution? Do sexual images from Greek mythology need to come with a viewer-beware label?

Colleges across the country this spring have been wrestling with student requests for what are known as “trigger warnings,” explicit alerts that the material they are about to read or see in a classroom might upset them or, as some students assert, cause symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder in victims of rape or in war veterans.

The warnings, which have their ideological roots in feminist thought, have gained the most traction at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where the student government formally called for them...

Full article at http://mobile.nytimes.com/2014/05/18/us/warning-the-literary-canon-could-make-students-squirm.html

We're waiting until the Christian Right discovers what kind of university trigger warnings The Bible would get, starting with nudity and fratricide in the Garden of Eden and moving on to mass drowning (Noah), polygamy, adultery, etc.

As for the NY Times, it is pretty clear the newspaper thinks you should take your trigger and stuff it: