A key element in the new culture war that has swept through universities around the world has reached Australian campuses.

Monash University has become the first in Australia to implement a policy of "trigger warnings".

In its pilot program, 15 of the university's course outlines carry the warnings of potentially emotionally distressing content.

The university says political correctness played no part in its decision, but critics say it is a concession to students demanding to be shielded from ideas they disagree with.

The pilot involves the university asking its academics to review course content looking for "emotionally confronting material" in the discussion of sexual assault, violence, domestic abuse, child abuse, eating disorders, self-harm, suicide, pornography, abortion, kidnapping, hate speech, animal cruelty and animal deaths including abattoirs.

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'This will allow students … to prepare themselves'

Matilda Grey says trigger warnings allow people to manage their responses to confronting issues. ( ABC News )

The policy is the culmination of years of campaigning by the university's Student Association.

Union president Matilda Grey dismissed criticism of the move, saying the current generation of students was simply more aware of the range of experiences of their peers that included for example, those who have been traumatised by sexual assault or other violent crime.

"We're not suggesting that students shouldn't be faced with challenges during their uni experiences," she said.

"We're not suggesting that they shouldn't be faced with difficult, discomforting topics at all.

"But this will allow students who do have a response, whether that be an anxiety attack or a panic attack based on any previous traumatic experiences, to be able to prepare themselves and take responsibility for their actions and manage those responses."

That raises a difficult question.

Monash University said all course content will remain examinable.

So where would that leave a student who, having been warned that course material might traumatise them, decides they cannot attend a class or read a text?

'Life is emotionally distressing'

Marguerite Johnson says it's absurd that unis should be guardians of emotionally distressing situations. ( ABC News )

Conservative critics, like Chris Berg from the Institute of Public Affairs, say the claimed goal of protecting students' emotional wellbeing masks a political agenda.

"We've seen how this has played out in the US and it can turn into a censorious, highly politically correct [culture] and highly harmful to the mission of education that universities exist for," he said.

Newcastle University associate professor Marguerite Johnson has never shied away from warning students when particularly explicit material was coming up.

But while she considers herself a progressive educator, she too objects to the idea of a university administration codifying when trigger warnings are to be given.

For a start, she thinks Monash University's threshold of "emotionally distressing" sets the bar ridiculously low.

"Life is potentially inevitably, regularly, emotionally distressing," she said.

"The world is emotionally distressing and I find it quite absurd that the universities may see themselves as the guardians of emotionally distressing situations.

"We are not preparing them for the real world."

She believes warning students about texts interrupts the way they approach and interpret works.

"If we are warning them all the time, then we are creating a preconceived notion that this material is going to upset me," Associate Professor Johnson said.

While in recent years criminal law students at Harvard University have objected to the discussion of sexual assault law because it could cause victims distress, Associate Professor Johnson said it is the very fact that material might disturb students that can benefit society, pointing to the reform of sex assault laws in Australia.

"Those young feminist students in the 70s who were reading law and looked at the way women were represented in the law, who studied rape cases, who then went on to be lawyers who advocated to change the legislation about rape in court — if they hadn't experienced the horrors of reading the materials as students, how would they know what to fight against, how would they know what to kick against?" she said.

Fears trigger warnings could lead to censorship

The Great Gatsby has been singled out as a text which needs a trigger warning. ( Supplied: Warner Bros. )

Associate Professor Johnson also fears the move for trigger warnings on courses could lead to the imposition of warnings on specific texts.

That is hardly surprising given her long experience in teaching the ancient Roman poetry of Ovid.

In the United States, Ovid's Metamorphoses has been repeatedly targeted by students objecting to its sexually violent content.

The works of F Scott Fitzgerald and Virginia Woolf are among others singled out by students as difficult and requiring warnings.

Associate Professor Johnson believes such lists are a real threat to academic freedom.

"My fear is that if we go down the track of vetting courses and vetting course material, that we are handing over a lot of power to people can make decisions to censor your course material," she said.

"It could lead to certain courses being deemed by an advisory board as being too potentially traumatic to remain on the syllabus."

While the student body at Monash has no plans to demand warnings on specific works for now, it will not rule that out in the future.

"Certain texts that perhaps should be removed from courses, absolutely," Ms Grey said.

"But I wouldn't suggest that that would be anything that would be taken lightly and we would have received a broad group of students to suggest that that should be removed."

The Student Association at Monash is satisfied with the list of subject areas the university has adopted for trigger warnings, but at other campuses students are drawing up much more extensive lists.

The Network of Women Students Australia has its impressively long list that includes classism, corpses, skulls or skeletons, drug use or talk of drugs (legal, illegal or psychiatric), eye contact (scopophobia), food, gore, insects, medical procedures, mental illness, Nazi paraphernalia, needles, panic attacks, pregnancy, slimy things, snakes, spiders, trichitillomania, trypophobia, vomit, warfare and weapons.

It says it remains open to suggestions to add to that list.

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'Have an argument … don't say I'm too sensitive'

The Atlantic magazine pilloried what it called the "snowflake generation". ( Supplied: The Atlantic )

You can chart the explosion of the debate over trigger warnings, micro-aggressions and safe spaces on university campuses back to the publication of The Atlantic magazine in September 2015.

Called The Coddling of the American Mind, it pilloried modern students for their pursuit of emotional protection and their attempts to shut out viewpoints that conflicted with their own.

Almost from that moment today's student activists were labelled as the "Snowflake Generation", "wilting flowers" who demand to be shielded from difficult ideas.

Even the then US president adopted not only the position typical of his generation that today's students were too averse to controversy, he adopted the language of The Atlantic article too.

Speaking to an Iowa Town Hall on Education, Barack Obama did not hold back.

"I don't agree that you, when you become students at colleges, have to be coddled and protected from different points of views," the then-president said.

"Anybody who comes to speak to you and you disagree with, you should have an argument with them but you shouldn't silence them by saying, 'you can't come because I'm too sensitive'."

The history of trigger warnings themselves began some 15 years earlier, when they appeared on feminist blogs and websites like Ms magazine, to signal for example when the details of a sexual assault were coming up.

The idea was to allow victims of such assaults the chance to avoid further trauma, either by stopping reading or at least by being prepared.

When progressive university students embraced the concept, trigger warnings swept across American campuses, the demand for warnings expanding to mentions of racism and colonialism and a plethora of other subjects deemed potentially traumatic.

Now it has reached Australia.