Are university trigger warnings on books ridiculous?

UNIVERSITIES have slapped 1,000 trigger warnings on works by authors including Chaucer, Shakespeare and Dickens for fear of upsetting snowflake students (Mail). You can’t read this, you’re not allowed to read that — what about not reading any books when you’re at university? What would be the value of those degrees?

SAMUEL FAROOQ, London SW17.

IN DEFENCE of snowflake students, it’s not young people who have requested the book warnings. It’s universities who don’t have the guts to potentially upset or offend people. How can an entire generation be too sensitive? Consider the violence in films and the disturbing images that anyone of any age can look up online. Children and teenagers have seen and read far worse than the dark content of a Charles Dickens novel or Geoffrey Chaucer play. Students have been called mollycoddled and spoilt, and told that they don’t understand freedom of speech. But not all of them want to ban things or are traumatised by classic literature. It’s the university leadership that is treating young people as vulnerable and contributing to the stereotype of generation snowflake, partly as a result of the competition for tuition fees.

EMILIE McRAE, Trowbridge, Wilts.

SO YOUNG adults at university need to be shielded from classic novels while primary school children are being taught things they wouldn’t be allowed to see on TV before the watershed.

D. HARVEY-WILLIAMS, Sleaford, Lincs.

SACK the lecturers who have decided students need trigger warnings for books on their courses. What a shameful indictment of the standard of education that young people should be perceived as needing action to save their ‘feelings’. I despair when I compare these gestures with the hard lives endured by older generations. Mrs JOSÉ H. O’WARE, Methwold, Norfolk.