During the controversy surrounding the 1995 film Kids, I remember seeing my Uncle Eamonn on television defending the movie's release. While he wanted an R instead of an NC-17 rating, he did warn that "This movie isn't for kids." The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) gave the film an NC-17 rating because of its "explicit sex, language, drug use and violence involving children." My uncle's objection was not based on his desire to get kids to see Kids; the problem was that movie theaters would not show NC-17 films. This amounted to de facto censorship because many people would not be able to see the film and it would fail to make any money.
One remarkable feature of this controversy is how unremarkable Kids would be today. While its ability to shock still holds up, it now exists in a media landscape with such a proliferation of explicit sex, language, drug use, and violence that it would be hard to imagine its release making national news.
This observation seems to be at odds with a slew of recent essays that tell us that the current generation of college students are fragile, protected, and sheltered. Judith Shapiro calls this phenomenon the "self-infantilization" of students. Laura Kipnis worries about how students "cocooned from uncomfortable feelings" will deal with the harsh realities of the real world. Judith Shulevitz reports that students in the past were "hardier souls" who would have resisted intrusive supervision:
Only a few of the students want stronger anti-hate-speech codes. Mostly they ask for things like mandatory training sessions and stricter enforcement of existing rules. Still, it’s disconcerting to see students clamor for a kind of intrusive supervision that would have outraged students a few generations ago. But those were hardier souls. Now students’ needs are anticipated by a small army of service professionals — mental health counselors, student-life deans and the like.One feature of this current climate are requests for "trigger warnings" on course syllabuses. These warnings alert students to content that could cause psychological harm. A trigger warning is not unlike the MPAA's movie ratings. Trigger warnings do not for the most part require material to be removed from the course; they alert students to some themes and give them the choice about whether they want to expose themselves to this content. It is this request for an exemption that feels like a kind of de facto censorship to professors. It offends our sense of free inquiry and the necessity of confronting difficult subject matter.
Concerns about overprotection are not all that new. Many generations have lamented that kids today are spoiled and need to toughen up. For this reason, I tend to be suspicious of theories about generational essences. Such theories often draw heavily on nostalgic recollections of youth and tend to generalize about an entire era based on personal experiences.
Nevertheless, trigger warnings on college syllabuses are a novel development that asks for an explanation. I wonder, however, whether we can do a better job of analysis than we find in jeremiads against kids today. My goal here is not to defend or criticize trigger warnings, but to try to offer some more satisfying explanation about what is going on.
