Knowing in advance that the n-word word appears will not make cornerstone speech different nor make Frederick Douglass book read different. Students don't have to say n-word to read it in context either?
Trigger warning to classic movie would not be the whole plot. Plus plenty of students will know plot or read the plot on imdb and classic movies are very mild about rape and violence due to censorship at the time and generally society overreacting to those depictions back then. (If they are about to show snuff or B movies I am actually fine with students bailing out or at least know in advance.) Are they gonna show whole movie in lecture suddenly? That would be quite unlikely, things like movies tend to be homework.
The movies that made me feel bad about violence and stuff did not relied on surprise. Surprise is for entertainment and being clever in plot.
It's easy to point to any one example and say "Well that could still work." but the point I was trying to drive at is that this changes the dynamic of the lecture. Surprise can be used as a catalyst for introspection or introducing a strategic amount of discomfort to illustrate a point, etc. the point I was trying to make is simply that it has utility. When you are /required/ to have a trigger warning, as an instructor, you are being obligated to compromise the effect you were trying to persue and presumably you were trying to persue it because you thought it would help the class with some form of comprehension whether that be intellectual or emotional.
Even if you're not outright required to issue trigger warnings (lets say because a middle ground policy is implemented that encourages instructors to do so but leaves it to their discretion) those instructors are still required to adapt to triggered students or else they wouldn't have been encouraged/required to do so in the first place. But because there's no reliable way to know what specific content will trigger a student in a given class the system is actually incentivizing censorship because now the only way to ensure you minimize trigger events is to assume that every student is triggerable and so optimal content becomes content which is as unchallenging, emotionally speaking, as possible.
Allergies wouldn't be a terrible analogy. Lots of schools, in America I can't speak for Europe and elsehwere, have regulations about common allergies like peanuts. These regulations are targeted towards common allergies because otherwise the task of preventing allergic reactions becomes an all encompassing battle to minimize liability. That's not to say students with rare allergies shouldn't be accommodated at all, but at some point the impact on the other students has to be addressed.
And if it does, it sounds awful lot like something manipulative. Minor red flag wtf is going on manipulative. It is supposed to be college lesson.
Edit: I have seen trigger warning I lecture about American history from one of big schools (on youtube, they released it free). The lecturer just said "I will show violence" or some such and that was it. If you left the room, you would not get any special material. You would just avoid sight of dead mistreated people.
I think in general we agree that most lessons don't really need to be surprising, emotionally provacative, etc. But the reason I've been focusing on those examples is because it's not too hard to understand why a professor might choose to employ them situationally (the basic answer being showmanship that drives engagement of some sort). A similar but very different example would be something like a Sex & Gender course, I've only taken a few such courses but the first one really stuck with me because one of the early assignments was simply for students to break into same sex (technically gender presentation but we didn't know that concept yet) groups of two and hold hands in public with our partner for ten minutes. I could certainly see an argument for giving someone with a history of abuse a pass on this assignment but should the instructor have included a trigger warning in their syllabus calendar about it? The point of the assignment, as the professor acknowledged, was in part to make us uncomfortable and aware of how our discomforts might be tied to social prejudice.
You're right of course that this is all just theory. Real life is, well, it's real life it's nuanced and expecting some amount of situational accommodation isn't something I'm against. After all, if a professor offers office hours why shouldn't a student be able to use that time as part of how they work around content that's emotionally challenging for them? At the same time, and I guess what I should have led with in retrospect, my issue with a lot of solutions about trigger warnings or even just content consideration in general is that it's presented as a victimless accommodation when the dynamic from the instructor's side seems to favor watering down content for the entire class so that you don't have to sift through the chafe so to speak. I don't know what a good middleground solution is, and I do think it's worth pursuing one, but as far as trigger warnings specifically I don't think the benefits have been shown to be worth the trade.
It's a hard one to answer but I'll give the answers I can from my time in university. It's hard mostly because each instructor handles the material differently so often examples are oneshots.
With regard to sociology and anthropology, the Nacirema are often presented as a real tribe at first. Many students will realize what's happening, but the point of the assignment is to encourage students to realize that from the outside even their own culture is strange and in this way, so the idea goes, they are better able to view things from a neutral position because of this lesson on cultural introspection.
Other examples could be things like literature readings of classical texts. Many students are uncomfortable saying the N-Word, for obvious reasons, but censoring it diminishes the significance of the word and while that's not a bad thing in day to day life it's nonetheless bad if your goal is to impart on your students a sense of what weight that word carried in its historical context.
Movies are another good example. There are lots of classic movies that get shown to illustrate a point but part of the point is a conclusion that's arrived at over the course of a movie. On my mind when I say this is the short movie about a teacher who basically invents racism by telling her class children with one color of eye are better than the others and then later she reverses this decision. In both cases the children treated the inferior group overall worse and none of them liked being the inferior group.
>These things are rarely core issues of lectures, triggers based on what I read can be completely random things (not actual depictions of rape, but smell, sound color) which may make them useless for most.
This is ultimately the core point. Triggers are nuanced and often specific to the individual. There's no easy way to know in advanced what might set something off and so encouraging trigger warnings is ultimately encouraging censorship of long practiced content (whether that censorship is outright or in the form of encouraging a hopefully less confrontational presentation of the content which diminishes the emotional impact of the lesson).