Should book trigger warnings and bans at universities be reversed?

At least ten UK universities have removed books from course study lists or made the texts optional in order to protect students from “challenging” content, an investigation has found.

According to The Times, Colson Whitehead’s novel The Underground Railroad, which won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, has been “removed permanently” from a reading list at Essex University because of concerns about graphic depictions of slavery.

Other targeted texts include Swedish writer August Strindberg’s 1888 play Miss Julie, which has been axed from an undergraduate literature module at Sussex University because it contains discussion of suicide.

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The two universities “are thought to be the first in the UK that have purged books altogether”, said The Telegraph.

Another eight institutions, “including Russell Group members Warwick, Exeter and Glasgow, have made texts optional to protect students’ welfare”, The Times reported.

The paper sent almost 300 freedom of information requests to officials at universities across the UK, and uncovered 1,081 examples of trigger warnings across undergraduate courses. Influential British authors including William Shakespeare, Geoffrey Chaucer, Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë and Charles Dickens were reportedly “among those whose works have been deemed concerning enough to require warnings”.

The investigation also found that students had been given trigger warnings before studying The Bible, because of “shocking sexual violence”, and Oliver Twist, because of “child abuse”.

‘Cosseting students’

The practice of censoring “challenging” university texts “should cease before it goes any further”, said The Times in its leader yesterday. “Cosseting students is no part of the ethos of education.”

The paper described trigger warnings as a “corrosive phenomenon” and argued that students “who take offence at the content of books they are set should be told, civilly but firmly, that if their sensibilities need protecting then the academy is not the place for them”.

A string of high-profile figures have also spoken out against the censorship of books.

“This is pretty terrifying,” tweeted broadcaster Mariella Frostrup in response to the investigation findings. “Do we burn them next?” The Mail on Sunday columnist and fellow Twitter user Dan Hodges asked how such bans were “possible in a British University in 2022”.

Trevor Phillips, chair of the Index on Censorship, said withdrawing texts over descriptions of slavery was “fatuous, patronising and profoundly racist”. Tory leader hopeful Liz Truss agreed that universities “should not be mollycoddling students like this”.

‘Inclusive environment’

On the other side of the argument, historian Caroline Dodds Pennock accused The Times of an “embarrassing” exaggeration of the situation at Britain’s universities. “Two books. Universities removed two books. In the entire country,” she tweeted.

Liam Thorp, political editor at the Liverpool Echo, was equally scathing. “As the UK braces for potential blackouts, soaring poverty and suffering – The Times thinks the major story of the day is a couple of books not being taught at a few universities anymore,” Thorp tweeted.

Aberdeen University faced criticism last week for putting a trigger warning on the Old English epic poem Beowulf, which dates back to between the eighth and eleventh centuries.

In response, a spokesperson for the university told regional newspaper The Press and Journal that “this approach enables us to explore controversial topics that could otherwise be difficult to address in an inclusive and supportive environment”.

The “guidelines on content warnings” were “developed in collaboration with student representatives”, and students “have expressed their admiration for our approach”, the spokesperson added.