Professor Eric Heinze wrote an opinion piece for the Times Higher Education about how trigger warnings stifle debate at UK universities.
Recently the University of Nottingham received some backlash for issuing a trigger warning for “violence, mental illness and expressions of Christian faith” in a course on “Chaucer and His Contemporaries.” Many critics called it strange to warn against this on a course studying medieval literature with characters that are steeped in the Christian experience.
In his opinion piece, Eric Heinze, Professor of Law and Humanities at Queen Mary University of London, argues trigger warnings are a signal of a growing trend in universities where debate and discussion are avoided in favour of “one-sided rallies and campaigns.”
He goes on to say that people are often selective in what issues they attached a trigger warning to: “… trigger warnings’ masquerades of ethical universality turn out to be nothing but tribal slogans, trumpeting some forms of injustice while conveniently bypassing others.”
Read the full article in the Times Higher Education (subscription required).
Professor Heinze also appeared on the Free Expression podcast discussing Is Free Expression a ‘Liberal’ Principle?