Harvard Law Students: Not as bad as we think

When I first heard about the Harvard Law students refusing to learn about rape law, I was horrified — though, I never looked into it much further than ruminating on how angry I was. How could law students (the top ones, at that) refuse to learn about something so important? 

Upon looking deeper into this story, however, it appears that the story is much more complicated that it’s often presented. Instead of students merely refusing to study the material because it makes them uncomfortable, I think the infamous tale of the Harvard Law students tells a bigger story of how trigger warnings cannot possibly account for the myriad of traumas that could arise in a classroom, as Sara Ahmed discusses in “Feminist Hurt/Feminism Hurts.” A more structural change to how we think about oppression in the academy, I believe, is more fruitful to bettering the experience of survivors of sexual assault than trigger warnings could ever aspire to. 

The Harvard Crimson, the university’s student newspaper, wrote an extensive series on how sexism manifests itself in Harvard Law School, from the Socratic method applied in classes, to the overwhelmingly male faculty. In short, women participate less and perform worse than males in Harvard Law, even though they are just as “qualified” in terms of capacity when they are admitted. A Buzzfeed article draws upon student experience to reveal how this culture influenced a distinct movement towards requesting trigger warnings in rape law classes, and an outright refusal of learning the material:

 "Some hate when professors insist on using the Socratic method, a common law school teaching practice in which students are    cold-called and mercilessly questioned, because a rape survivor might have to argue an accused rapist’s case. Others don’t understand why professors engage with students who make insensitive remarks about victims such as 'What if she looked older than 12?' or 'Is it still rape if it wasn’t consensual but he really thought it was?' instead of shutting them down."

Jeannie Suk, a Harvard Law professor, fanned the flames to this discussion in her New Yorker article, where she states that “some students have even suggested that rape law should not be taught because of its potential to cause distress.” Most interpretations I’ve read make this statements out to mean that the content of the classes is inherently “distressing,” hence feeding into the greater moral panic of hyper-sensitive college students demanding special treatment. However, given the above accounts of Harvard Law students, I think it would be fair to counter Suk’s argument: perhaps these students don’t object to rape law being taught, but the way it’s being taught, and students, generally, are not given the tools or power to be able to nuance this conversation. It’s easier, I think, to ask “can you not teach this?” instead of asking “can you overthrow the oppressive and sexist scaffolding upon which you were founded?”

I do not think that trigger warnings are the answer for making campuses a safer space. Students who walk campus and risk walking into their perpetrators daily and survivors, in the most intimate and public spaces of their lives, are reminded of their trauma. A trigger warning will not save survivors from that. In our class discussion today, my group discussed how regardless of what a professor may put on their syllabus, it is moot unless you approach the subject in a particular way. A professor can put a trigger warning for sexually violent content in his syllabus, but he can be insensitive in a myriad of other ways. How would the trigger warning help in that case? I appreciate the approach Ahmed mentions in her article, which requires a close reading of the "atmosphere" in the class to determine which kind of material to introduce, and finding alternative ways to introduce content when the atmosphere doesn't "allow" it. 

Ahmed says that by overlooking that structural causes of “bad feeling,” the bad feeling becomes rooted in other people. That is, people become the imagined origins of bad feeling, even though the root of bad feeling is something bigger than that person. Students'  suffering may be read, on the surface, as “stifling,” as Ahmed explains, but I believe it runs deeper. Being exposed to others’ trauma does not only stifle our ability to "move forward" in course content — it reveals that the world is not as equal that we’d like it to be, reveals we have privileges over others that we can’t control, and, sometimes, painfully, reveals the hurt within ourselves that we’ve tried to put behind us. And, in my experiences where students’ have revealed this pain, the classroom was only able to move deeper and pose the literature to greater critique — not void it of politics, or nuance, or discussion, like critiques of trigger warnings seem to suggest. Ahmed expands upon this idea in "Against Students," where she makes the poignant assertion: "The idea that being over-sensitive is what stops us from addressing difficult issues can be translated as: we can’t be racist because you are too sensitive to racism. we need to be too sensitive if we are to challenge what is not being addressed."

So, I see the perceived "sensitivity" of the Harvard Law students as something that speaks more strongly to a sore need to uproot the heteropatriarchial values of the academy — something that the students seem to cry out for, but nobody notices. To mirror Ahmed's language, it seems the academy is disturbed by their ability to not be oppressive, because the students are too sensitive to oppressionn. Thusly, to challenge what is not being addressed, these students may just need to be sensitive.