--- title: University of Chicago: 'We Do Not Support Trigger Warnings' description: The school believes trigger warnings and safe spaces prevent the 'free exchange of ideas' canonical: https://time.com/4466021/uchicago-trigger-warnings/ author: IDEAS Desk article:opinion: true article:content_tier: free article:published_time: 2016-08-25T15:11:15.000Z article:modified_time: 2026-08-04T07:55:13.354Z article:section: Ideas og:title: University of Chicago: 'We Do Not Support Trigger Warnings' og:description: The school believes they prevent the 'free exchange of ideas' og:url: https://time.com/4466021/uchicago-trigger-warnings/ og:site_name: TIME og:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltd6018aeb89be9ead/6988a3a5a988ca33956b9320/university-chicago-uchicago-trigger-warnings-safe-spaces-college-campus.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 og:image:width: 3000 og:image:height: 1688 og:image:alt: Rockefeller Chapel, University of Chicago campus og:type: article twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: University of Chicago: 'We Do Not Support Trigger Warnings' twitter:description: The school believes they prevent the 'free exchange of ideas' twitter:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltd6018aeb89be9ead/6988a3a5a988ca33956b9320/university-chicago-uchicago-trigger-warnings-safe-spaces-college-campus.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 ---  # University of Chicago: 'We Do Not Support So-Called Trigger Warnings' > Sponsored content. 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A paid TIME subscription is separate and available at time.com/subscribe-agent. ### Sources * TIME Newsletters: [time.com/newsletters](/c/time-nl-inside-2026q3/newsletters?i=481fae48-4408-4ebf-9c79-4b9af7a919d6&cr=time-nl-inside-2026q3-v1) ## Video: My Rapist Is Still on Campus: Sexual Assault in the Ivy League [Watch (HLS stream): My Rapist Is Still on Campus: Sexual Assault in the Ivy League](https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/o8izpqKu.m3u8) (6:50)  _Published 2014-05-14. In April, 23 Columbia and Barnard students filed a federal Title IX complaint alleging that the University mishandled sexual assault cases_ by [IDEAS Desk](https://time.com/author/ideas-desk/) ## IDEAS Desk Aug 25, 2016 3:11 PM UTC  Rockefeller Chapel, on the University of Chicago campus. Rockefeller Chapel, on the University of Chicago campus. Matt Frankel#128360—Flickr Vision by [IDEAS Desk](https://time.com/author/ideas-desk/) ## IDEAS Desk Aug 25, 2016 3:11 PM UTC In a letter, the incoming class at the University of Chicago were given a strong mandate by the institution they have elected to join: “Members of our community are encouraged to speak, write, listen, challenge and learn, without fear of censorship. Civility and mutual respect are vital to all of us, and freedom of expression does not mean the freedom to harass or threaten others. You will find that we expect members of our community to be engaged in rigorous debate, discussion, and even disagreement. At times this may challenge you and even cause discomfort.” One way to ensure this, writes Dean of Students Jay Ellison in [the letter obtained by _Intellectual Takeout_](http://www.intellectualtakeout.org/sites/ito/files/acceptance%5Fletter.jpg), is to eliminate “trigger warnings” and “safe spaces,” two topics of frequent discussion in recent years. A trigger warning is advance notice about subject material that may be difficult for certain students to read, hear or see; a safe space is a place they can go to avoid those subjects or heal after confronting them. Often used at least with the stated attempt of avoiding inflicting further trauma on victims, particularly those of sexual assault, the methods have also been criticized as means of preventing students and lecturers from exploring difficult issues together. [As TIME reported in May](http://time.com/4347099/college-campus-protests/), a Knight Foundation [survey](http://www.knightfoundation.org/publications/free-speech-campus) showed that “54 percent of students said the climate on campus prevents some people from saying what they believe because they are fearful of offending others.” At Brown in 2015, [a debate about sexual assault was questioned](http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/22/opinion/sunday/judith-shulevitz-hiding-from-scary-ideas.html). [At Oberlin, students have sought trigger warnings for _Antigone_](http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/05/30/the-new-activism-of-liberal-arts-colleges); [at Columbia, for Ovid’s _Metamorphoses_](http://time.com/3860187/columbia-trigger-warning-greek-mythology-metamorphoses/); [at Rutgers, for Virginia Woolf’s _Mrs. Dalloway_](https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/may/19/us-students-request-trigger-warnings-in-literature). At Brandeis, [an installation by the Asian American student association to show microaggressions often made against them](http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/09/the-coddling-of-the-american-mind/399356/) (like remarks “Aren’t you supposed to be good at math?”) was shuttered after other Asian American students protested that the display itself was a microaggression. A professor at Harvard Law School has written about [the near-impossibility of teaching rape law with trigger warnings](http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/trouble-teaching-rape-law). The University of Chicago writes that it believes such actions do not foster intellectual freedom, but intellectual fear: --- > “” --- --- **Correction**: The original version of this article misstated when students received the notification. They received a letter in August. ## Transcript My name is Emma [ UNKNOWN ]. I am a junior at Columbia college. I am a visual arts major. On the first day of my sophomore year, I was raped by a fellow classmate. I didn't report at first because. It's a big emotional trauma, and I didn't feel like dealing with it at first, until I met at that time, two other women who told me the same person who had assaulted me, had assaulted them. The school found a way to dismiss each of our three cases separately. [ MUSIC ] My rapist, it still goes to my school, and still is on campus. [ MUSIC ]. This is not a single campus issue. This is not an individual issue. This is a cultural problem. We have a huge issue with rape culture on all college campuses. There was a study that was done that shows that men on college campuses who are perpetrators. Are more often than not repeat offenders. The average number of people a perpetrator will sexually assault is six, according to this study. So this isn't a random phenomenon. This isn't this happens in an alley, this happens when everyone's incredibly drunk at a party. There is a certain profile for what sexual assault looks like on a college campus. And that is why we need administrators to be open, and transparent, about that. Right now, their approach seems to be to ignore the problem, to try to deny students access to resources, to deny that that's happening at all when it fact they really should be getting in front of the issue. Our hearing took place seven months after I reported the incident. The investigator in my case didn't take down many important things such as the position I was in when he raped me. My hearing panelists weren't even trained, one woman kept asking me how it was physically possible for anal rape to happen. Why Columbia didn't find him responsible? I don't actually get to write a statement of what happened. It's all the investigator's statement that they read. There's an office called the Office of Gender Based and Sexual Misconduct. You go in there and at that time a woman was working there so I told her what had happened. She was the one who took erroneous notes, and missed really important that I said. Since her statement didn't make any sense, my case didn't make any sense. I think another reason that the school didn't find him guilty was that they, they really didn't want to treat it as a serial rape case because we, all three of us reported, and then they would say you are not allowed to mention each others' cases, we are going to treat them separately. I think that. If the hearing panel have had known that this was a serial offender, they might have believed us more maybe? They also said that there was not enough evidence to determine that it was more likely than not. That the respondent engaged in behavior that met the de, definition of sexual assault. So the charge was dismissed. [ MUSIC ] There are many reasons why a student would choose to not go to the police, and go to, you know, a campus adjudication process. Many people don't want the outcome to be the person that attacked them to go to jail. If you're a person of color. Or if you're ****, the process of going to the police can also be one that is not necessarily competent or great to deal with. Some people seek out resources from their school in order to make sure they're not living in the same dorm as a person who assaulted them, which is very different from making sure that someone goes to jail. And I also think that improving processes on campus across the board. Including you know, therapy for survivors, adequate rape crisis centers, and adequate academic interim measures, are things that are important for everyone to have the police absolutely cannot give you when you're a student. Everyday I'm afraid of leaving my room. Even seeing people who remotely look like my rapist is a scary thing for me. Last semester, I was working in the dark room in the photography department. Which is a small dark room. He asked permission from his teacher to come and work in the darkroom during my class. I started crying and hyperventilating and. As long as he's on campus with me he can continue to harass me. They're setting up for graduation for all of the seniors and all of the bleachers are coming up on campus. And, I was just thinking about the fact that. Because of what the administration did, I'm going to have to be sitting on those bleachers with my rapist and a serial rapist at that. Knowing that he's going to get the same education as me and I'll be feeling horrible on my graduation day. A lot of students think that when they go to a campus, if they see that there are zero sexual assaults reported that that's a really positive thing, that, that must mean that campus is incredibly safe, it's going to be a great place. But actually when you consider the fact that the overall rates of sexual assaults on campus are as high as one in four, if you see a campus reporting zero sexual assaults that should actually be a red flag. [ MUSIC ] I feel like it's taken over my entire, entire college experience. This happened on the first day of my sophomore year. And here I am. I just finished my last day of school for my junior year. And I'm still talking about it and still thinking about it. And I know that I'm going to look back on my entire Columbia experience and see that's how the administration has failed me. and. It's, it's like a cloud that will always hang over me. ```json [{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"OpinionNewsArticle","@id":"https://time.com/4466021/uchicago-trigger-warnings/","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://time.com/4466021/uchicago-trigger-warnings/"},"headline":"University of Chicago: 'We Do Not Support So-Called Trigger Warnings'","datePublished":"2016-08-25T15:11:15.000Z","dateModified":"2026-08-04T07:55:13.354Z","description":"The school believes they prevent the 'free exchange of ideas'","url":"https://time.com/4466021/uchicago-trigger-warnings/","keywords":["Education"],"thumbnailUrl":"https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltd6018aeb89be9ead/6988a3a5a988ca33956b9320/university-chicago-uchicago-trigger-warnings-safe-spaces-college-campus.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=1200:675&height=675","author":[{"@type":"Person","name":"IDEAS Desk","jobTitle":null,"url":"https://time.com/author/ideas-desk/"}],"articleSection":"Ideas","image":[{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltd6018aeb89be9ead/6988a3a5a988ca33956b9320/university-chicago-uchicago-trigger-warnings-safe-spaces-college-campus.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=1200:675&height=675","width":1200,"height":675,"headline":"Rockefeller Chapel, University of Chicago campus","caption":"Rockefeller Chapel, University of Chicago campus","creditText":"Matt Frankel#128360—Flickr Vision","representativeOfPage":true}],"publisher":{"@type":"Organization","name":"Time","url":"https://time.com/","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://time.com/images/logo.png","width":528,"height":156},"foundingDate":"March 3, 1923","sameAs":["https://www.facebook.com/time","https://www.instagram.com/time/?hl=en","https://twitter.com/time","https://www.pinterest.com/timemagazine"]}},{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"BreadcrumbList","itemListElement":[{"@type":"ListItem","position":1,"item":{"@id":"/section/ideas/","name":"Ideas"}},{"@type":"ListItem","position":2,"item":{"@id":"/tag/education/","name":"Education"}},{"@type":"ListItem","position":3,"item":{"@id":"https://time.com/4466021/uchicago-trigger-warnings/","name":"University of Chicago: 'We Do Not Support So-Called Trigger Warnings'"}}]},{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"VideoObject","name":"My Rapist Is Still on Campus: Sexual Assault in the Ivy League","description":"In April, 23 Columbia and Barnard students filed a federal Title IX complaint alleging that the University mishandled sexual assault cases","thumbnailUrl":"https://cdn.jwplayer.com/v2/media/o8izpqKu/poster.jpg?width=720","uploadDate":"2014-05-14T14:51:05.000Z","contentUrl":"https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/o8izpqKu.m3u8","embedUrl":"https://time.com/4466021/uchicago-trigger-warnings/","duration":"PT6M50S","potentialAction":{"@type":"SeekToAction","target":"https://time.com/4466021/uchicago-trigger-warnings/?jw_start={seek_to_second_number}","startOffset-input":"required name=seek_to_second_number"}}] ```