The University of Northampton has warned students that Orwell’s dystopian novel contains ‘explicit material’ which some may find ‘offensive and upsetting’.
Students doing a module called ‘Identity Under Construction’ will have to decide whether they are emotionally robust enough to read several literary works, including Nineteen Eighty-Four. The information was revealed by the Mail on Sunday after a Freedom of Information request was granted.
Critics of the decision were quick to point out the irony in issuing a trigger warning for a novel that illustrates the dangers of censorship and gave us terms such as ‘Big Brother’ and ‘Thought Police’.
Conservative MP Andrew Bridgen told the Mail on Sunday: ‘Our university campuses are fast becoming dystopian Big Brother zones where Newspeak is practised to diminish the range of intellectual thought and cancel speakers who don’t conform to it.
‘Too many of us – and nowhere is it more evident than our universities – have freely given up our rights to instead conform to a homogenised society governed by a liberal elite “protecting” us from ideas that they believe are too extreme for our sensibilities.’
GB News presenter Stephen Dixon described the trigger warning as ‘woke gone mad’ and likened it to a warning on a packet of peanuts that tells you ‘it might contain peanuts’.
The university has also issued warnings over content prescribed in its English course. Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog In the Night-Time now comes with a warning that it includes ‘death of an animal, ableism and disability and offensive language’.
A university spokesperson said that while trigger warnings are not official university policy, some courses may contain challenging texts and that ‘[we] have accounted for this when developing our courses’.
[Image: https://pixabay.com/vectors/nineteen-eighty-four-1984-1211494/]