Would you hire a lawyer who couldn’t handle references to violence? If not, then be wary of anyone who graduated from Oxford with a law degree in 2016.
Lecturers at my old university are being told that they should issue ‘trigger warnings’ when discussing ‘potentially distressing’ cases. I suppose it was only a matter of time before this latest madness spread from American to British campuses.
Oxford undergraduates reading English, for example, are now given a “trigger warning” about Robert Lowell’s 1964 poem, “For The Union Dead,” because it contains the following stanza about Colonel Robert Gould Shaw and the all-black 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry that he led during the Civil War:
Shaw’s father wanted no monument
Except the ditch,
Where his son’s body was thrown…
Never mind that the poem is about a memorial to the black and white heroes who fought side-by-side against slavery, all in the midst of the civil rights movement of Lowell’s day. Context is never a defense in these cases. A student’s readiness to take offense trumps the literary canon.
In much the same way, an older student and janitor at Indiana University-Purdue University at Indianapolis was disciplined in 2008 for racial harassment just because during his break, he had been seen reading a book titled Notre Dame vs. the Klan.
The book is a sympathetic history of Notre Dame students’ opposition to a Ku Klux Klan march in South Bend, Ind., in 1924. But one of his co-workers on the school’s janitorial staff took offense at the image of a Klansman on the cover, and that was all that counted.
British students are having to learn the bizarre newspeak with which Americans are familiar: “micro-aggression,” “safe space,” “cultural appropriation.”