You know Americans have heard of a thing when it shows up in a sitcom.

Two years ago, on ABC’s Last Man Standing, Tim Allen played a self-made sporting goods executive who was writing a commencement address for a business college. Professors banned his speech for microaggressions. He scoffed that this was “the latest liberal attack on free speech” in “one of those safe spaces.” They wanted to protect students “from what, ideas?”

My aunt praised the episode on Facebook, marveling that she “can’t believe they’ve left him on this long,” given how often Tim Allen “speaks his (conservative) mind.” But as a university instructor who teaches American and world history, I wondered how to explain why I found the episode strange.

If you believe what you hear, American colleges are suffocating under political correctness. In the name of “safety,” liberals are silencing campus debate. Besides microaggressions and safe spaces, the chief villains in this tale are trigger warnings, which supposedly let students avoid hearing any uncomfortable ideas.

Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt wrote a whole book about it in The Coddling of the American Mind, associating trigger warnings with rampant “safetyism,” along with empty playgrounds and peanut-free schools. Young Americans, they argue, are being trained for lives of anxiety and overreaction, even in college.

I have taught history courses in US universities for about a decade. I do think some educators are overprotective. But in general, the critics do not describe the higher education system — or the students — I know. And the attacks on trigger warnings often trivialize the very real trauma that some students have experienced.

The real struggles of college students

I teach at private universities, so my students are relatively privileged — though they do not attend the kind of elite college, like Oberlin or Columbia, that furnishes most of the critics’ anecdotes about political correctness. Yet when studying difficult topics, as they routinely do, my students have never asked for a trigger warning or a safe space. Neither have my employers.

But students do talk to me. The closest they came to requesting a trigger warning was the time a student wrote a note to explain that a topic from that day’s class — clergy sexual abuse — might be difficult for her to discuss because she had experienced childhood abuse by a minister and was just beginning to come to terms with her memories. Most of the time, though, students come to me later to say, apologetically, why mental health struggles at home make it difficult to come to campus or keep up with the college workload, and ask how to make up lost ground.

I had a military veteran make sure I understood why he needed a seat in a far corner, where he could see the door. Another veteran missed class for a court date — apparently a domestic violence charge. He was absent a lot.

One student told me, late in the semester, that her father had been murdered just days before classes began. She happened to miss our next lesson, which covered World War II, saving me the trouble of deciding whether to skip some of the images of dead bodies I was going to show from the Holocaust. Another student started missing class, then showed up at my office. Shaking, she whispered that she had been raped. Shame was keeping her away from campus.

One student, an eager freshman, suddenly stopped participating in class, as if someone had switched off a light. A friend in her dorm had died by suicide. Another, a senior who had grown up near our campus, struggled to stay awake in class. When his grades started to slip, he came to me and told me he was desperate to pass: he needed to get his degree and get away from his hometown, where nine people from his high school had overdosed.

There was the young student who wrote an apology on her late homework, hoping I would still accept it. She was taking care of her mother, just out of rehab. Another student apologized for being distracted in class; she had a campus stalker.

There was the grandmother who called me, sobbing, after she forgot to complete an exam — a result of cancer treatment. She was earning a degree in the time she had left. Could she come back to finish the test?

The student who was coming to terms with her childhood abuse by a clergy member eventually dropped the course.

None of them asked for a trigger warning. None asked for a safe space. If they had, they would not have been avoiding ideas. All my students have ever requested is a way to keep engaging with the content — all the content — of my courses, in spite of setbacks. In other words, they want to finish the work they started.

Content warnings are uncommon and do not prevent discussion

I do not use the term “trigger warning” in my work. It has too much baggage, and nobody seems to agree about its meaning.

But when I show my students a gruesome photograph, I may provide — thinking of my veterans — a simple heads-up, like, “The next slide shows dead soldiers.” I am inconsistent about this. Sometimes I let students know when I am about to discuss sexual violence in a lecture; often, I forget. Mostly, I try to demonstrate respect, including respect for students with different ideological viewpoints. I’m sure my students have sometimes been offended, but I have never avoided a topic or debate.

Is my experience unusual? In 2015, an unscientific survey of literature and art professors found that only 12 percent gave regular trigger warnings, and 45 percent opposed them. In 2016, NPR asked 829 professors in various fields; barely half had ever given a trigger warning, and only 3.4 percent had ever been asked. The American Association of University Professors opposes trigger warnings. Psychology instructors generally oppose them too.

Just to check, I surveyed my friends. Have undergraduates ever asked them for a trigger warning or a safe space, in those words? Only four said yes, and if I know them, they never avoid difficult topics. Twenty-five of my academic friends, at schools ranging from community colleges to major research universities, said no, never.

One friend did hear complaints from a class after she showed them a harrowing documentary about 9/11 without telling them what to expect. Oddly enough, the same students had all agreed with an earlier assigned text — Lukianoff and Haidt’s critique of trigger warnings.

Colleges are still good places for free speech

Whether the debate over trigger warnings involves criticism within the academy or attacks from outside, it has contributed to popular clichés and ideological grudges that have little to do with what most students learn. Its stereotypes about students are mostly slander. Worse still, it promotes cynicism and closes minds.

Listening to some critics, you might never know that colleges usually make students more open to different views, including conservative views, and more supportive of free speech. You might never know that the vast majority of professors, liberals as well as conservatives, defend the free exchange of ideas on campus. Or that having a college education is a weaker predictor of an American’s political views than her race, gender, age, or religion are. College is opening minds, not closing them.

It’s time to calm the public panic about student fragility. American undergraduates are adults facing problems courageously. They show intellectual curiosity and greater political independence of mind than the US public in general. By and large, their professors are trying to understand and honor their personal struggles in a world without neat solutions.

Jonathan W. Wilson, PhD, is an adjunct professor of history at Marywood University and the University of Scranton. He previously taught at La Salle University and Syracuse University. The opinions expressed here are his own.

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