Reluctant as I am to kick over a ladder I have recently climbed, it has to be said, British Universities aren’t what they used to be. Having worked in a series of them myself, one can’t help feeling they are reaching their sell by date. At the very least, their politically correct antics are making them laughingstocks, tripping over each other as they are to be top of the woke pops.
The list is growing, but amongst the best, reported in The Express, was the University of Cambridge, which has put trigger warnings on such disturbing works as Little House On The Prairie for stereotypical depictions of Native Americans (you mean they don’t say ‘How!’ and wear feathers?), and on Titus Andronicus, because themes of gore and violence might be upsetting.
The University of London has warned that depictions of poverty and crime in Oliver Twist could cause ‘distress and anxiety’. The University of Northampton issued an alert about George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. Salford University warned against Dickens’s Great Expectations and Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre, for reasons I have not ascertained. Perhaps Nineteen Eighty-Four is too close to the truth for general consumption, Great Expectations might give people unrealistic hopes of an anonymous benefactor. For sure, Jane Eyre has some disturbing references to ‘heaving breasts’ which certainly gives young men unrealistic hopes.
Now, placing itself well in the running for ‘Stupidest University of the Year’, the University of Aberdeen has ‘slapped’ a trigger warning on the Old English classic Beowulf. Apparently, there be monsters contained therein and them be a bit bloodthirsty. I have read two translations of this epic poem, the recent ones by Seamus Heaney and the brilliant feminist translation by Maria Dahvana Headley (Editor: enough virtue signalling).
I can confirm there be monsters galore, they kill copiously and violently and, inevitably, they meet their own gory and violent end. For example, Grendel’s mother (ever so slightly pissed off at Grendel’s killing) dies thus: ‘Beowulf seizes the huge sword and swings it in a powerful arc. The blade slices cleanly through the Grendel’s mother’s neck, and she falls dead to the floor, gushing with blood.’ Nice! And Grendel himself meets a very grisly end: ‘Beowulf’s men heroically hack at the demon as Beowulf fights with him, but no weapon on earth is capable of harming Grendel. Beowulf summons even greater strength and rips Grendel’s arm completely out of its socket. Fatally wounded, Grendel slinks back to his swampy home to die.’ Upsetting stuff, especially if you identify as a mythical Norse monster…which never existed!
For the love of God, this is the generation that watches The Hunger Games, Game of Thrones, Stranger Things and Squid Games. I don’t watch these things myself because my children and grandchildren have slapped trigger warnings on them for me; the all-purpose ‘not your thing Dad’. I suspect that there may be generous lashings of teenage sex contained in these programmes from which they wish to protect my sensitivities. Little do they know!
So, what’s next for a trigger warning? Here is my top ten from a cursory glance at our bookshelves:
Humpty Dumpty – an egg gets broken
Mr Messy – may be triggering for people with OCD
Swallows and Amazons – dangerous unsupervised sailing by children
The Coot Club – ditto
Little Women – offensive to little women
The Charge of the Light Brigade – horses probably got killed
A Catechism of Christian Doctrine – depictions of Hell
The Holy Bible – ditto plus homophobia and quite a few other phobias
War and Peace – lots of words
Mein Kampf – where do I start?
Roger Watson is a retired academic, editor and writer. He is a columnist with Unity News Network and writes regularly for a range of conservative journals including The Salisbury Review and The European Conservative. He has travelled and worked extensively in the Far East and the Middle East. He lives in Kingston upon Hull, UK.
