University Adds Trigger Warning for "Christian Faith" to Classic Literature

Do university students need a trigger warning that a text contains Christianity?

The University of Nottingham in the U.K. apparently thinks so. The school issued a trigger warning for students that The Canterbury Tales contains “incidences of violence, mental illness, and expressions of Christian faith.” 

Now, as they weather accusations of coddling students and going “woke,” the school says the content warning is being taken out of context.

Trigger Warning

It’s one of the most well-known, widely-read texts in the history of the English language. Written between 1387 and 1400, Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales is a collection of 24 stories told by various travelers on a religious pilgrimage from London to Canterbury Cathedral. Written in Middle English, modern readers are likely going to have a difficult time parsing the 14th century text. 

The University of Nottingham believes there’s another problem modern readers may encounter: “Expressions of Christian faith.”

That warning, issued to students taking the university’s ‘Chaucer and His Contemporaries’ course, prompted widespread outrage online, with many mocking the idea that college students need a trigger warning for Christianity.

“I think when people are at university they should engage with difficult topics and make sense of them for their own thinking and living. You can't protect people from difficult subjects,” said Monsignor Dr Michael Nazir-Ali, former Anglican Bishop of Rochester. “That is the whole point of going to university. I don't think students need trigger warnings. What is needed is good teaching so these difficult issues can be given context.”

Even in the world of academia, many found the idea preposterous. Frank Furendi, a sociology professor at the University of Kent called the warnings “weird,” pointing out that because “all characters in the stories are immersed in a Christian experience, there is bound to be a lot of expressions of faith.”

"The problem is not would-be student readers of Chaucer but virtue-signaling, ignorant academics," he said.

“Alienating and Strange”

Responding to the backlash, the school says that the trigger warnings are being taken out of context by reactionaries. They say that the warnings exist simply to prepare them for how to engage with a text steeped in Middle Age Christianity that they’re likely to find “alienating and strange.”

A university spokesman said: "The University of Nottingham champions diversity, and its student body is made up of people of all faiths and none. This content notice does not assume that all our students come from a Christian background, but even those students who are practicing Christians will find aspects of the late-medieval worldview they will encounter in Chaucer and others alienating and strange.

All students may appreciate knowing in advance about some perspectives that will be covered, for example, the anti-Islamic sentiments of some medieval writers. This content notice does not discourage students from encountering any of this material, but enables questions to be raised, so as to set that material in a properly critical framework."

Is This Needed?

It’s clear from their response that the school felt the need to alert their diverse student body that they’ll be reading a text reflecting the values of Middle Age Christians, which at times expresses problematic and outdated points of view,  which students will not fully agree with. 

But critics say… isn’t that obvious? Geoffrey Chaucer has been dead for more than 600 years. Surely his writing will not fully reflect modern values.  And isn’t higher education a place where students’ viewpoints are supposed to be challenged anyway?

What do you think? Does The Canterbury Tales need a content warning for “expressions of Christianity,” or is the school simply going too far?