Daily Mail (UK) (Chris Hastings) reports:
[S]taff at the University of Northampton have issued a trigger warning for George Orwell's novel on the grounds that it contains 'explicit material' which some students may find 'offensive and upsetting'.
The advice [was] revealed following a Freedom of Information request by The Mail on Sunday….
[I]t is one of several literary works which have been flagged up to students at Northampton who are studying a module called Identity Under Construction. They are warned that the module 'addresses challenging issues related to violence, gender, sexuality, class, race, abuses, sexual abuse, political ideas and offensive language'….
I think if individual faculty members want to warn students about particular books this way, they should be free to do so. And I actually support warning students generally about this—preferably in orientation, but perhaps even at the start of a class syllabus—precisely to remind them that studying the human experience at a university necessarily involves confronting the dark sides of humanity.
