Fail U.: The False Promise of Higher Education by Charles J. Sykes

Author:Charles J. Sykes [Sykes, Charles J.]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 9781250091765
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Published: 2016-08-08T22:00:00+00:00

OVID, THAT SEXIST BASTARD

The crusade against triggering classics is waged with a grim humorlessness matched only by its dogged literalism. At Columbia University, several students took it upon themselves to quantify—complete with pie charts—every single incidence of rape, assault, “or other nonconsensual activity” in the university’s humanities curriculum. Their chart helpfully broke down the world’s great literature into “Women Raped” and “Women Not Raped.”24 Ovid was a particular problem:

In the first semester, a quarter of the characters were women and about 20% of those women were raped, which is on par with conservative estimates of rape on college campuses. The second semester had a much higher figure than the first, around 50%, mostly due to Ovid’s Metamorphoses (which has roughly 80 instances of assault). Even this number is an underestimate, though, as I treated many of the instances of mass rape on the syllabus as a single data point for simplicity. It’s worth noting that these mass rapes were almost always directed at a conquered group—think about the “victory tour” after the Trojan War portrayed in The Odyssey.… these tactics are still used in imperialist warfare today.

This critique of Ovid inspired Todd Gitlin to ask, “Why stop with Ovid? Has anyone taken a look at the Old Testament recently?”* But the Columbia activists would probably not have gotten the joke. Grimly, they insisted that universities that celebrated diversity should “stop assuming that we will all share neutral responses to often violent and triggering material.” In other words, Columbia students simply could not be expected to handle the insensitivities that ran rampant through Homer, Augustine, Ovid, Shakespeare, Cervantes, Dostoevsky, Sophocles, Euripides, Herodotus, much less Genesis.

A university that uncritically accepts rape in its foundational literature class, without any thoughtful discussion directly addressing rape and sexual assault, must question its ability to firmly reject rape and sexual assault on campus. The same can be said of Lit Hum’s other violences: a campus with this syllabus at its core will never be proactive in addressing the needs of students of color, queer and trans students, disabled students, low income students, or any other marginalized groups.

Not all students or academics are willing to concede the need for triggers on works of literature. The push for the warnings became the subject of considerable debate at the University of California at Santa Barbara, where the student government urged the school to add triggers to course syllabuses to protect students from being exposed to material that might trigger a traumatic reaction.25

Some critics on campus questioned whether students really needed to be protected from material that might be outside of their comfort zone. “The learning process necessarily involves exposing people to ideas that will challenge their beliefs and make them feel uncomfortable,” a political science major named Jason Garshfield pointed out to the student newspaper. “People who attend college are implicitly agreeing to be pushed outside their intellectual and emotional comfort zones.… I would like to see the [Student] Senate have a higher regard for the fortitude and resilience

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