Why trigger warnings and safe spaces are vital to free speech

On March 24, The American Association of University Professors released a Report on Title IX that contends “the growing federal emphasis on combating sexual harassment on campus, along with universities’ broadening definitions of inappropriate sexual behavior, has had a chilling effect on academic freedom and speech.” Unless you’re in the field of higher education or happened across the New York Times article on it, this Report likely did not garner your attention. Lack of fanfare aside, this Report is important. How the academic world and wider world perceive Title IX is important. The Report’s authors gets one thing right: academic freedom is at stake — just not exactly in the way they want you to think.

The Report begins with a historical overview of Title IX, largely to demonstrate how its current implementation differs from its original intent. The authors write, “Sexual harassment was not mentioned in the original statute […]Instead, it was a broader view of sex discrimination that was the focus of early interpretations of the law.” True. But the authors omit an important piece of information: “Sexual harassment” was a completely unheard of term when Title IX was passed in 1972; of course it wasn’t mentioned in the original statute — it didn’t exist. “Sexual harassment,” the term, is a relatively new invention. The first judicially-recognized instance of “sexual harassment” occurred in 1977 in a case called Barnes v. Costle. Before that case, sexual harassment had no name. The Report makes it seem as though the phrases “sexual harassment” and “hostile environment” are just overly-broad buzzwords with unconstitutionally censorious consequences on so-called “academic freedom” (which is 100% a buzzword that certainly does not appear in the Bill of Rights). But “sexual harassment” and “hostile environment” are legally-defined terms that have been developed over the course of decades of advocacy.

Back in 2014, when The Atlantic and The New Yorker published widely-shared articles about trigger warnings as a hallmark of repressive teaching policies and coddled students, I had mixed feelings. I was in my third year of law school, and I felt strongly that a curtailed discussion on rape in criminal law classes did a disservice to students and to victims of sexual violence, alike. I appreciated trigger warnings in my extracurricular life (for example, I was grateful when a friend told me I might want to avoid watching Game of Thrones), but I resisted the use of trigger warnings in the classroom. I had heard stories of professors handling the “rape unit” of first-year criminal law (a mandatory 1L class) in various ways: I’d heard of professors not teaching the rape unit at all, of professors using students in hypotheticals, of professors having a “no cold call” policy, of professors discussing only outdated case law and shying away from current controversies, of pr

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