The time has come to put Dr Seuss at the top of the read­ing list for uni­ver­si­ty stu­dents, aca­d­e­mics and admin­is­tra­tors. Not the books, but one of his many intel­li­gent and use­ful quotes: “The more that you read, the more things you will know. The more that you learn, the more places you’ll go.”

And if that seems like a child­ish idea, con­sid­er this: the Uni­ver­si­ty of Aberdeen, a 525-year-old insti­tu­tion that ranks among the top 160 uni­ver­si­ties in the world, has decreed that Shakespeare’s “Julius Cae­sar”, Robert Louis Stevenson’s “Kid­napped” and Charles Dick­ens’ “A Tale of Two Cities” require “trig­ger warn­ings”.
Appar­ent­ly, stu­dents bright enough to be accept­ed there need to be alert­ed that the works have “poten­tial­ly dis­tress­ing con­tent”, which includes “ref­er­ences to vio­lence, abuse, or psy­cho­log­i­cal trau­ma, includ­ing things like phys­i­cal alter­ca­tions, sex­u­al assault, and ver­bal harassment.”
Since all those things are, unfor­tu­nate­ly, part and par­cel of life these days, sure­ly read­ing about and dis­cussing them in both a mod­ern and his­tor­i­cal con­text would be more help­ful than harmful?
But no. Aberdeen Uni­ver­si­ty staff were informed that: “Con­sid­er­a­tion should be giv­en to each and every ele­ment of the course, regard­less of his­tor­i­cal peri­od, fic­tion­al set­ting, medi­um or any oth­er poten­tial­ly mit­i­gat­ing factor.”
By that log­ic, the his­to­ry depart­ment might as well be scrapped alto­geth­er, and stu­dents should be warned to avoid video games, movies, most TV shows, the run­away hit series “Squid Games”, news­casts, radio reports and newspapers.
For their part, stu­dents alleged­ly expressed a “strong pref­er­ence” for warn­ings about poten­tial­ly “dis­tress­ing” and “emo­tion­al­ly chal­leng­ing” nov­els, plays and poems. The list of those also includ­ed — believe it or not — Jane Austen’s “Per­sua­sion”.

                                     WHY WASN’T I TOLD?

Stu­dents can walk out of lec­tures “with­out penal­ty” if they find a top­ic too upsetting.
No one told me that when I had to read all those plays and books in high school. Still, as far as I can tell, I’m not emo­tion­al­ly harmed or men­tal­ly scarred for not hav­ing been afford­ed warn­ings to pro­tect me from: a book writ­ten in 1886, a play penned 400 years ago and set in 44 BC and an acknowl­edged clas­sic tale of the French Revolution.
The efforts seem designed to turn class­rooms and lec­ture halls into “safe spaces” which, on a mod­ern uni­ver­si­ty cam­pus, “may exist in the abstract, such as dur­ing a con­ver­sa­tion about a sen­si­tive sub­ject,” or can be “any loca­tion deemed ‘safe’ by stu­dent vol­un­teers or fac­ul­ty with inclusion/diversity training.”
Cer­tain­ly “safe spaces” are nec­es­sary. Nature embeds the abil­i­ty to find or cre­ate them into the DNA of vul­ner­a­ble crea­tures. White-tailed deer fawns, for exam­ple, emit almost no scent for sev­er­al weeks after they are born.

Hav­ing a “safe space” is essen­tial for ear­ly sur­vival in an envi­ron­ment for which deer have no oth­er defences. 

With­in a few weeks, the fawns learn to for­age and no longer need to be nursed up to four times a day. In effect, they begin to attain a state of maturity.
The 18th cen­tu­ry Ger­man philoso­pher Immanuel Kant described matu­ri­ty in humans as “…hav­ing the courage to use one’s own intelligence”.
It seems to me that a uni­ver­si­ty ought to fos­ter that by pro­vid­ing an atmos­phere of intel­lec­tu­al vigour, where schol­ars can feel free to take risks, chal­lenge con­ven­tions and change their minds.
Treat­ing stu­dents like fawns by gen­u­flect­ing to social trends that demand pro­tec­tion from any­thing that might in any way prove dif­fi­cult to deal with is counter-pro­duc­tive. Expe­ri­ence shows that it is also insulting.

                                     CONFRONT VS CODDLE

 Tom Clark, a retired Eng­lish teacher (and full dis­clo­sure: a per­son­al friend) describes him­self as “for­tu­nate to have taught Shake­speare to the crème-de-la-crème” of high school seniors:
“The high­lights of the year includ­ed a two-day trip to Strat­ford (Ontario) to see three plays which we includ­ed on the cur­ricu­lum, and our Shake­speare­an ban­quet at the end of the year.  It was a cos­tumed deal where the stu­dents would present favourite scenes from the plays and we would feast on pot luck. To this day it nev­er fails that when I meet one of my old stu­dents from those class­es, they regale me with a sto­ry and tell me how impor­tant it was to have been treat­ed like adults with mature themes spo­ken about freely. Those days, alas, appear to be gone.”

Along with Dr Seuss, insti­tu­tions that see “trig­ger warn­ings” and “safe spaces” as vital com­po­nents of their cur­ricu­lum would also ben­e­fit from the wis­dom of the late British nov­el­ist, essay­ist and not­ed crit­ic E.M. Forster:
“Spoon feed­ing in the long run teach­es us noth­ing but the shape of the spoon.”

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