It was political correctness in the ’80s, speech codes in the ’90s, and “empathetic correctness” among today’s college students demanding “trigger warnings.” So says an English professor who actually helped a student rape victim get counseling after she expressed feeling “traumatized” by a class discussion of a book’s rape plot.
Writing in The Atlantic, Liberty University professor Karen Swallow Prior says:
While political correctness seeks to cultivate sensitivity outwardly on behalf of those historically marginalized and oppressed groups, empathetic correctness focuses inwardly toward the protection of individual sensitivities. Now, instead of challenging the status quo by demanding texts that question the comfort of the Western canon, students are demanding the status quo by refusing to read texts that challenge their own personal comfort.
It’s the difference between George Orwell, who feared “an external form of control that becomes internalized,” and Aldous Huxley, who foresaw “an internal form of control that becomes externalized,” she says. This is how bad it’s become:
Astonishingly, some of the literary works advocates claim need warning labels for adult college students are often read by high school students, such as The Great Gatsby and The Merchant of Venice.
She sees a new danger in the squeamishness of “Millennials with hovering parents” expanding to the rest of the population. Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne’s description of religious liberty as a “gift,” in response to the recent Supreme Court decision upholding sectarian prayers in town meetings, could mean that “challenging reading material in college” is optional too:
How can empathy even be cultivated apart from a willingness to have our preconceptions and our very comfort challenged? The sort of citizenry that demands warning labels on the best gifts of civilization is a citizenry ill-equipped to maintain such rights.
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