Educational entitlement: dumb, lazy and problematic

College can be a pretty weird place. Jam any number of young adults with raging libidos into a high-stress environment, and all kinds of crazy stuff will go down. But hand those same high-strung and impassioned people a whopping sense of entitlement and unshakable certainty in their own morals? Things will get surreal.

This past week, incoming students at Duke University made national headlines because they refused to do their summer reading. The students refused to read "Fun Home," a graphic novel by Alison Bechdel (who, it must be noted, is a recipient of the MacArthur Foundation "genius grant" award) because it features light nudity and consensual lesbian sex. The Duke idiots cited their conservative Christian beliefs when asked why they didn’t do their homework. They did not wish to read "Fun Home" because the book went into detail about topics they found morally or politically objectionable.

Perhaps I’m alone, but the story about the Duke idiots seemed very familiar to me. It wasn’t because of the all-too-common homophobia and Victorian sensibility at the root of this reaction, but rather, the juvenile and entitled way in which the Duke idiots expressed their disagreement.

It reminded me of what I’ll just call trigger-warning culture, for purposes of brevity and because "trend of ridiculous, vindictive public shaming and blind reliance on dogma" is a tad unwieldy.

Trigger warnings themselves are pretty innocuous and have genuine uses. Their intended use is as a warning label to readers about content that could possibly cause panic attacks or bring up memories of past trauma. Usually, this is done to protect survivors of sexual assault, or people who may have experienced extreme prejudice or other types of violence talked about in academic writing.

But these things freak out a lot of people, from professors to comedians on campus telling off-color jokes, and most recently a pair of researchers — a constitutional lawyer and a social psychologist — who wrote in The Atlantic about trigger-warning culture and how it actually hampers people with mental health issues.

Why? Well, as they say, the thing is not the thing. In reality, people aren’t freaked out by demands for warning labels on works of art and literature so much as the obtuse and zealously self-righteous culture they’re associated with, a political culture which is much broader than mere demands for warning labels. That’s where the comparison to the Duke idiots lies: their unwillingness to openly deal with ideas that challenge or even fall outside of what they believe is acceptable is no different from trigger-warning culture’s view on subjects they don’t agree with. It’s just tougher to argue against it, because the things it objects — racism, misogyny, homophobia — are real evils that need to be fought against.

Ostensibly, the goal of trigger-warning culture is to make a college campus a safe space for all students to learn and engage freely without prejudice in all its forms. But that perfectly good idea is often taken to absurd lengths which doesn’t make campuses safer, but rather reduces their value as places for learning and intellectual growth. The MO of trigger-warning culture is to apply sociological terms and concepts to situations and make snap, final judgements based on that knowledge. Take the Brandeis Asian American Student Association’s exhibit on the everyday casual racism (microaggressions) Asian Americans face, which was taken down because it contained examples of said microaggressions and was deemed triggering. Apparently, educating about the issue is as "problematic" as the issue itself.

It would be a mistake to focus solely on the absurdity of this trend though, because it’s not limited to vaguely leftist activists who learned about these concepts on Tumblr. They get the most attention because they’re the organized and obvious example of this collegiate entitlement.

But the debacle with the Duke idiots proves this is a problem across the political spectrum, where people are unwilling to engage with educational material that doesn’t fit neatly into the ideology they held the moment they graduated high school.

What’s disturbing about this isn’t a perceived restriction on "free speech" — that’s not actually at risk here. It’s the flagrant lack of regard for critical thinking or for putting things in context.

This is a grown-up manifestation of the entitlement brought to us by helicopter parenting and treating college as a place to validate your pre-existing opinions. It’s intellectually lazy and undermines the whole value of our education.

Alec Carver is a UF history junior. His column appears on Fridays.