A host of classic books for young people, including the first Harry Potter novel, have been marked with trigger warnings at one of the country’s leading universities.
Students at the University of Glasgow have been cautioned that Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone contains “outdated attitudes, abuse and language”. In the novel, the eponymous hero – and here readers of a nervous disposition may wish to look away before rejoining us in the next paragraph – is bullied by his aunt and uncle and forced to sleep in a cupboard under the stairs. He later learns that his parents were murdered by Lord Voldemort, a malevolent wizard, and that his own life is in grave danger.
The work by J.K. Rowling appears alongside a number of titles, including Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll, the dystopian 2001 novel Noughts & Crosses by Malory Blackman and Edith Nesbit’s 1899 book The Treasure Seekers, all assessed as having the potential to cause upset. The warnings have been issued to all students taking part in a module titled “British Children’s Literature”.
A spokeswoman for the Russell Group institution defended the practice, insisting that content advisories “help students prepare for critical discussion. Unlike children reading for pleasure, undergraduates analyse these texts in depth, which can highlight outdated attitudes around childhood, race or gender.”
The spokeswoman continued: “We believe that content advisories have an important role to play in an educational setting, allowing lecturers and students to engage in a positive learning and teaching experience on issues across the whole range of human experience and history. They also ensure we can engage with course content in as sensitive and respectful a way as possible.”
It’s a revealing statement. Branding a work “outdated” appears to prejudge precisely the sort of question that ought to be thrashed out in a seminar room, not decided in advance by central decree – after all, isn’t the concept of “outdated attitudes” itself ripe for unpacking in a humanities classroom?
The language also seems carefully calibrated to chime with recent guidance from the sector regulator, the Office for Students (OfS), which is notably cautious about content notes, warning that they risk chilling teaching unless there is “evidence [that] they are in fact helpful” in enabling students to “access material”. There is a growing body of empirical work suggesting that, in scholarly contexts, trigger warnings often exacerbate anticipatory anxiety rather than easing it, and can function as ideological cues, subtly shaping how students are expected to read a text.
Yet Glasgow’s statement, with its confident assurances about how content advisories “help students prepare” and “ensure” sensitive engagement, presupposes a countervailing research base.
As it happens, we may soon find out what that evidence looks like. CAF has submitted Freedom of Information requests to all 24 Russell Group institutions asking what evidence they hold that trigger warnings are helpful in enabling students to, as the OfS puts it, “access material”.
One of the themes to emerge from the responses received so far is that universities, as central corporate bodies, often claim they are simply unable to say. A typical reply runs that the university “does not hold any evidence” on content notes, and that “the information you have requested is held at school level and is not collated”.
Given the clarity and confidence of Glasgow’s public statement about the benefits of content advisories – where the evidential basis for their use appears to have been miraculously easy to hand – it will be interesting to see whether, when responding to our FOI, the university now pleads the familiar line that the relevant information is scattered across departments and couldn’t possibly be “collated”.
This article forms part of the Committee for Academic Freedom’s monitoring of developments in UK higher education. To receive monthly updates and analysis on cases affecting academic freedom, click the link and subscribe to our newsletter.