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Over the last couple of years, the practice of including "trigger warnings" on course syllabi or articulating them aloud in classes that include potentially disturbing, offensive or triggering content has become the institutional norm, if not also a requirement (as it is more or less becoming at many institutions). What detractors remain don't really question the fundamental advisability of trigger warnings anymore, but rather the practical details of their definition and scope. As someone who teaches almost exclusively in the areas of moral and political philosophy, I've struggled a great deal with parsing the often subtle distinctions between "disturbing," "offensive" and "triggering" content. Like any other decent teacher and moral agent, I do not wish to cause my students harm, though that does not necessarily mean that I do not wish them to sometimes reckon with material they may find disturbing or offensive. In fact, I think there are a great many instances in which such reckoning has tremendous educational value, either because it provides students an opportunity to more carefully consider the true nature of the offense or, just as frequently, because it provides them an opportunity to revise what they have taken, indefensibly, to be "offensive."
I suspect that I am not alone among (especially nontenured, female) philosophy professors in being even more anxious about potentially "offensive" material discussed in my courses given the recent ugliness of the Abbate/McAdams case. I've been lucky, I think, to have avoided a situation like Abbate's so far. Although I'm quite positive that students have been disturbed or offended by some of my course content, none have registered an official complaint or been moved to speak to me directly to that effect in the last ten years. That streak ended in my Philosophy of Film course a few weeks ago.
