It’s not fair to the colleges or to them to expect them to hack it any more than it’s fair to expect someone with easily broken bones to become a body builder. Either the college will have to dumb its educational mission down to the point of meaninglessness, or the extremely damaged will have to put themselves at risk of interminable mental agony. The first option destroys learning; the second destroys people. Better to keep the people incapable of learning away from it.

I know what it is to be triggered. I also have never resented a professor for not warning me in advance. If anything, I was grateful. For me, something being triggered was a bright flashing arrow indicating precisely what I most needed to work on to be able to live a normal life and cease permitting my painful past to control me. Seeing that truth and your own disorders don’t line up can be frightening or liberating; often both at the same time. Like Plato’s philosopher, whose eyes burn in the light of the sun when he first emerges from the cave, stripping away your own mental illness’ illusions can be very painful. As in Plato, it is also worth it.

But if you can’t brave that light, you don’t deserve it. If you need trigger warnings in order to learn, then the only warning we should hear is a warning against letting you in the classroom. There will always be those who prefer to be lost, but we don’t need to burn maps to accommodate them. To get back to educating students, colleges need to understand that some would prefer to remain lost in a dark wood of error. For those students, there can be only one option, and it is to inscribe above the campus gates the only warning the ineducable deserve to read…