Trigger Warnings in Law School

More proof idiots are running the academy.  From 12/17/14  Inside Higher Ed:

Trigger warning policies in college classrooms have been controversial since their inception, with advocates saying they protect students who have had traumatic experiences – primarily sexual assault – from having to relive them as part of their education. Opponents, meanwhile, have argued that trigger warning policies infringe on instructors’ academic freedom and deny students one of the hallmarks of a college education: being made to feel intellectually uncomfortable at times.

That conversation has now reached law schools, based on an essay by Jeannie Suk, a professor of law at Harvard University, that was recently published by The New Yorker.

In her piece, called “The Trouble with Teaching Rape Law,” Suk argues that increased anxiety among her students and colleagues about discussing complicated sexual assault cases is impeding criminal law professors’ ability to do their jobs well – ultimately at the expense of students and the rape victims whom some of them will eventually represent.

“Student organizations representing women’s interests now routinely advise students that they should not feel pressured to attend or participate in class sessions that focus on the law of sexual violence, and which might therefore be traumatic,” Suk says. “These organizations also ask criminal-law teachers to warn their classes that the rape-law unit might ‘trigger’ traumatic memories. Individual students often ask teachers not to include the law of rape on exams for fear that the material would cause them to perform less well.”

Some of the comments tell me that the idiocy may be too deeply embedded now for college to survive.