There’s a debate raging about trigger warnings right now. Again. A recently published article in The Atlantic is staunchly against them; an op-ed in the New York Times argues in their favor. One side argues that we’re failing to educate our students, the other argues that it’s a question of basic sensitivity.

Classics has been implicated in the discussion of trigger warnings for months now. The Columbia op-ed that kicked off the debate in May began with the story of a student being triggered during a class discussion of Ovid. The texts we study have been singled out rhetorically, so as a discipline we need to respond with a strong statement of how to handle these concerns.

The op-ed itself, in my view, is something of a mess. It conflates three entirely separate issues: whether to warn students in advance of reading a text that may contain disturbing material, how to handle difficult texts during class discussion, and changing the content of literature courses so they are not so skewed toward Western texts. The third concern should be entirely separate from the first two. These are framed as all being questions of ‘identity’, but feeling that one’s viewpoint is underrepresented on a syllabus is not the same as experiencing PTSD.

Although I’ve never written about this issue in Eidolon, I did write about it for Jezebel several months ago, because it’s an issue I care about deeply. My feeling is that the language of institutionally mandated ‘trigger warnings’ is inherently flawed: ultimately, we cannot fully protect traumatized students, nor should the responsibility for those students be placed on teachers (who are not mental health professionals and, especially if they are adjunct, are possibly the most vulnerable members of the university community).

However, I do believe in teaching hard topics — rape, suicide, oppression — and, in my experience, class discussions are more productive when you make the students aware in advance of the sensitivity of the upcoming material. One of the most rewarding feelings I’ve ever experienced is being told by teachers that reading my Jezebel article led to a much more nuanced and engaging discussion of Ovid in their classrooms.

Sometimes the debate over trigger warnings is framed as a debate over whether we should teach hard topics at all. I understand the logic: if we make teachers responsible for issuing trigger warnings, we imply that if a student is triggered, the teacher is somehow at fault for not preventing it from occurring. Instructors may therefore choose to avoid difficult material altogether.

But classicists don’t have that option. Our discipline is forever teetering on the edge of irrelevancy in the public mind, and if we don’t talk about the painful, disturbing issues that still matter to people today then we’ll certainly fall off that edge.

Classics cannot only be about dead white men talking about how to define ‘the just’. It never was. After all — as a recent op-ed pointed out in the Chronicle of Higher Education —Plato’s trauma at losing his teacher Socrates lies at the foundation of our academic institutions.

So continue to pitch hard topics to Eidolon, and we’ll continue to publish them.

In September, Eidolon published seven articles:

Will Theiss reflected on what the monument to the capture of Judaea on the Arch of Titus in Rome can tell us about our complicated feelings toward the Confederate Flag in The Menorah on the Arch
Frederic Clark rewrites the history of Classics as a discipline as the search to root out forgeries in Forging Antiquity
Michael Fontaine elucidated the similarities between the founding of the Mormon Church and Euripides’ Bacchae in American Bacchae
James Romm reviewed Xerxes: A Persian Life by Richard Stoneman and judged it a failure as a biography but a great success as a study of Xerxes lore in A Persian Life?
Mallory Monaco Caterine problematized the rhetoric of otherness used to describe ISIS by showing that their rhetoric isn’t much different from that of Xenophon in Finding the West in ISIS Propaganda
Abigail Palmer explored the idea of California as a new-world land of joyful oblivion in Harvest in Lotus-Land
Luke Madson compared Spartan helotage with American slavery (and explained why such a comparison was necessary) in The American Helot?

Next month we’ll be publishing some articles about Spoken Latin — a specialty of the Paideia Institute — as well as more comparisons between the ancient world and the modern one, on issues from the destruction of monuments to throwing out garbage receipts.

Happy reading!

Donna Zuckerberg received her PhD in Classics from Princeton in 2014. She is the founding editor of Eidolon and teaches Greek drama at Stanford Continuing Studies and online for the Paideia Institute. Read more of her work here.

The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not reflect the views of the Paideia Institute.