Raise the Bar In the article, “The Coddling of the American Mind,” Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt state that the use of trigger warnings on college campuses are having unintended consequences. A trigger warning is used by a professor to notify students when they are about to discuss material that has the potential to be upsetting or offensive. Lukianoff and Haidt believe that these trigger warnings have been put in place to appease the student’s demands for a safe space where they can learn. The article opens by stating. “a movement is arising, undirected, and driven largely by students, to scrub campuses clean of words, ideas, and subjects that may cause discomfort or give offense.” The authors argue that this movement stems from a generation that feels entitled to the right to not be offended. This has led to a social environment where professors and students alike feel fearful to speak their mind freely. The trigger warnings these professors are using exasperate the current atmosphere of extreme political correctness. In the view of Lukianoff and Haidt, these trigger warnings are gasoline on the fire. Their claim is that the warnings lead to unforeseen consequences. The warnings lead to the censorship of controversial or challenging ideas. Due to this fact, this generation of students are graduating college ill prepared for the real world. To even further their claim, Lukianoff and Haidt state that trigger warnings lead to increased anxiety and mental illness. The author’s write about how simply stating that someone is offended has become an irrefutable claim. It is shocking to hear what lengths the American society has gone through to appease these easily offended individuals. Trigger warnings in and of themselves are harmless. However, the risks of employing them greatly outweigh the benefits. For example, at Washington State University, seemingly innocuous words such as male, female, illegal alien, and tranny are off limits in a Popular Culture course. Political correctness is defined as avoiding language or behavior that any particular group of people might feel is unkind or offensive. What ever happened to free speech? It is one thing to suggest that certain words should not be used out of politeness. Once professors claim that arbitrarily chosen words are off limits it becomes censorship. I agree with the author that trigger warnings may lead to negative effects such as censorship. However, I could not agree less with the claim that trigger warnings have anything to do with the prevalence of mental illness in young adults. According to the National Institute of Mental Health, the prevalence of anxiety disorders is higher in both the age group of thirty through forty-four and forty-five through fifty-nine than it is in young adults eighteen through twenty-nine. If the author’s claim that trigger warnings are leading to the rise of mental illness in students then what is causing older Americans to have higher rates of mental illness than the youth? Trigger warnings lead to an atmosphere of over sensitivity, but it would be a stretch to say that they lead to mental illness. In my own experiences political correctness and oversensitivity extend out of campus classrooms. At almost any job orientation these days new employees must sit through a series of either lectures or training videos detailing acceptable behavior and language in the workplace. Training videos detail many situations in which actions that seem innocent on the surface could be grounds for sexual harassment. Telling a coworker that it seems they have lost weight could be grounds for harassment. Even if the comment was made in an attempt to compliment a coworker, it can be considered harassment if the coworker is offended. According to this particular training video this is because the comment infers that the person giving the compliment was judging the other person’s body. Our culture has gotten to the point where we need to walk on eggshells when interacting with our peers. Social interaction and the exchange of even simple conversation suffers in the current social climate. The purpose of trigger warnings is to protect students from negative emotions. What trigger warnings are doing is just the opposite of that. They create an element of fear in everyday interactions on college campuses and workplaces. I even find myself running through how what I plan to say might cause a negative reaction by the person I am speaking to. How should I rephrase this? Is this person going to claim to be outraged? By the time I internalize all of these questions the moment is gone and chances are I’ve kept my idea to myself. Due to social media the fear of being caught saying the wrong thing is real. We live in a world where the quick exchange of ideas has many benefits. One of the disadvantages and misuses of this technology is when someone is publicly shamed for saying what is perceived to be offensive. No one is perfect. Sometimes we do say things that are truly offensive. We need to take steps to create a safe atmosphere for the free exchange of ideas. Yes, even the offensive or controversial ones. College campuses are a place where for the very first time students choose to be educated. Students are now entirely responsible for their own education and what they get out of it. This includes the responsibility to control their emotions and approach difficult subjects with maturity. Our society needs to empower our young people. We need to demand more, not less of them. Trigger warnings lower the bar to make accommodations for students who aren’t capable of being mature. The students who are most likely to make a positive impact on our society suffer because of it. Trigger warnings aren’t allowing our brightest students to share their valuable ideas. I want to raise the bar for higher education.