As totally bizarre as it may sound, George Orwell’s novel against totalitarianism, 1984, has been labeled by a British so-called “institute of higher learning” with a trigger warning for today’s hyper-offended students.
The University of Northampton is warning students that Orwell’s work contains “explicit material” that could be deemed as “offensive.” Not to be outdone, Oxford University is warning that certain medieval classics just may be “racist and misogynist.”
Reporter Nathaniel Charles of Breitbart.com notes;
George Orwell’s classic novel 1984 has been slapped with a trigger warning by a British university following concerns that students could find it “offensive and upsetting”.
The University of Northampton has branded George Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984 — which examines how the role of truth and facts in a society can be manipulated under authoritarian rule — with a trigger warning over supposed concerns about “explicit material” within the book.
Following a Freedom of Information request from the Mail on Sunday, it was discovered that the English department at the University of Northampton had warned students taking the module ‘Identity Under Construction’ about Orwell’s anti-totalitarianism novel as it might be upsetting or “offensive” to the fragile generation.
Just day before Northampton’s headshaking announcement, Oxford University did their level best to one-up their neighbor to the north.
As published by Britain’s The Spectator, William Atkinson reports;
[T]he authorities are discouraging students from reading texts deemed too challenging. According to the Telegraph, Oxford English tutors are reportedly slapping trigger warnings on medieval texts used on literature courses. Students are being warned that The Canterbury Tales, Beowulf, and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight may be ‘racist and misogynist’.
That poetic works from the Middle Ages fail to reach the exacting standards of today’s neurotic racial and sexual politics should hardly be surprising. What is rather more shocking is that tutors in one of the world’s best universities are seeking to ward students off from important works that played such a key role in the development of the English language. What possible reason could a tutor have for finding them problematic?
Supporters of trigger warnings argue that preventing students from reading key texts is the last thing they want. Their objective instead is to protect vulnerable students from reading anything that might ‘cause them harm’. This view would be more sympathetic if a book involved something particularly personally traumatic for a student. Yet it is impossible to guard for that without prying far too deeply into someone’s life – or taking the book off the shelves altogether.