Fewer than 1 percent of survey respondents said their institutions had adopted policies on trigger warnings, but 7.5 percent said students at their institutions had initiated efforts to require them. Twice as many — 15 percent — reported that students in their own classes had requested trigger warnings. Likewise, 12 percent said their students had complained when they hadn’t been warned about distressing content.

A majority of educators (58 percent) said they’ve voluntarily provided some sort of warnings about course content, though the warnings may have been broadly worded and they didn’t necessarily allow students to opt out of course materials.

Some professors said they thought trigger warnings had pedagogical value. But most expressed anxiety about how they affect academic freedom, and many reported feeling bullied into sanitizing their syllabuses.

Trigger warnings, one educator wrote, force “teachers to change their teaching plans based on calculations about what topics might hurt students’ feelings or make them feel ‘unsafe.’ ”