Trigger Warnings and Safe Spaces

Abstract

AbstractThe popular appeal of viewpoint diversity as an apparently new model of intellectual diversity is deeply connected to hyperbole about trigger warnings and safe spaces on college campuses. Sensational narratives about those topics throughout the mid-2010s seldom presented fair and accurate information about universities. Those narratives generated, instead, popular new stereotypes about students from historically disenfranchised communities, personified in the figure of the pathologically coddled student. This chapter argues that fixations with trigger warnings and safe spaces are foundational to campus misinformation. It also contends that such fixations have helped to normalize new forms of sociopolitical invective beyond college campuses, which exacerbate sociopolitical divisions instead of promoting constructive intellectual disagreement. Dispelling hyperbole about trigger warnings and safe spaces can help to promote better-quality information about university teaching while offering valuable insights into norms of sociopolitical disagreement.