It seems as though free speech is constantly being challenged on college campuses these days, and this year is shaping up to be no different than the last. Students are pushing faculty for mandatory trigger warnings on one campus, and administrators are imposing speech restrictions on students at another.
At James Madison University’s freshman orientation this year student leaders received a seven-page speech guide, including a list of 35 phrases to avoid. The guide was adapted from Dr. Maura Cullen’s book, “35 Dumb Things Well-Intended People Say: Surprising Things We Say that Widen the Diversity Gap,” and includes phrases such as, “you have such a pretty face,” “we’re all part of the human race,” “I treat all people the same,” and “it was only a joke.”
JMU’s communications director told The College Fix “this was just an exercise, prior to orientation, to get our volunteers to understand how language affects others,” and argued that students were not explicitly told they could not use the phrases.
However, recent JMU graduate Wes Fisher told Red Alert Politics that the administration has “started to bow down to political correctness” in the past few years.
At one point, the school was named one of the seven best colleges for free speech by the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education. In 2014, FIRE downgraded its “Speech Code Rating” from a green light to a yellow light after several new policies were introduced, including a 48-hour pre-registration requirement for student demonstrations and a requirement that student groups obtain administrative approval before surveying or petitioning students.
“JMU’s motto is ‘Knowledge is Liberty,’ and it is a shame to see that the administration often tries to discourage certain viewpoints, or in this situation, discourage certain phrases because of a paralyzing fear that someone, somewhere may be offended,” Fisher said. “I think students on campus now are concerned that JMU is becoming an environment that is less welcoming to free speech — something that many students would point out is very much at odds with our namesake James Madison, who literally wrote the First Amendment.”
Meanwhile, at American University in Washington, D.C., the situation is reversed. Students are fighting against their faculty, demanding mandatory trigger warnings on all syllabi and in all academic spaces.
“There’s a difference between our students and our faculty about the necessity of trigger warnings on syllabi and the importance of centering student trauma in academic spaces,” Devontae Torriente, president of American’s student government, said in a recent YouTube video introducing the new proposal. “The fact of the matter is, trigger warnings are necessary in order to make our academic spaces accessible to all students, especially those who have experienced trauma.”
AU sophomore Josh Singer told Red Alert Politics that the majority of the student body is in favor of mandatory trigger warnings and believe that they make classes more accessible, but personally, he doesn’t think they will solve anything.
“If a student is worried they might encounter traumatizing content, they can ask the professor beforehand about the content discussed, bypassing the warnings entirely,” Singer said. “These warnings also discourage professors from teaching certain subjects that they know will require trigger warnings due to student backlash or lack of participation.”
Students may struggle to get faculty and administrators on board in this case. Last year, the AU Faculty Senate came out with their own resolution against trigger warnings.
“American University is committed to protecting and championing the right to freely communicate ideas — without censorship — and to study material as it is written, produced or stated, even material that some members of our community may find disturbing or that provokes uncomfortable feelings,” the faculty resolution said. “This freedom is an integral part of the learning experience and an obligation from which we cannot shrink.”
