I recently read about a trend that has started in the US (but will surely spread to the UK in time) for progressive universities to protect their students from language that may upset them in academic texts. Advisory warnings have been placed on certain books studied on undergraduate literature courses that might possibly cause offence to ultra-sensitive students, delicate flowers that they are.
For example, a student activist at Rutgers University in New Jersey warned that F Scott Fitzgerald’s masterpiece ‘The Great Gatsby’ exposes readers to “a variety of scenes that reference gory, abusive and misogynistic violence”. And this is not an isolated example.
At Oberlin College in Ohio professors were instructed to provide warnings for any material that might trigger traumatic student memories of sexual violence, racism, class conflict, prejudice against the disabled and anything else the liberal arts college described as “other issues of privilege and oppression” to avoid unnecessary student trauma.
Elsewhere, the Student Union at the University of California at Santa Barbara has demanded that mandatory trigger warnings be put in place, while at Georgetown University in Washington activists are campaigning against language that purportedly denigrates the disabled. The list of ‘ableist’ terms to be avoided includes phrases such as “turning a blind eye” (offensive to blind people), “wheelchair-bound” (“uses a wheelchair” is suggested as a better alternative) and ‘failure’ (“deferred success” is preferred). ‘Brainstorm’ is another no no (use ‘mind map’ instead), ‘short’ (try “vertically challenged”) and even ‘differently abled’ comes in for criticism, with ‘neurodivergent’ suggested as a substitute.
Political correctness gone mad or, as the autistic disability activist and author Lydia Brown argues in her blog, simply “basic human decency and respect for others”? I’d be interested to hear your views!
