The content advice is not really censorship or brainwashing, but when they are put on everything from Frankenstein to Harry Potter, it makes the institution seem confused, writes columnist Marissa MacWhirter

The University of Glasgow has struck a nerve, yet again, with its “content advice” warnings, this time slapping one on Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. I sucked my teeth to the beat of my eye twitching when I read that students were being emotionally prepared to encounter “servitude” in the Gothic classic.

“Servitude”, defined as the state of being enslaved or subjugated by someone more powerful, appeared alongside “abuse” and “violence” in the content warning. Frankenstein was just one of three books with content warnings on a first-year course called Critical Skill-Making: The Study of the Novel. The others, revealed by a Freedom of Information Request, were Oscar Wilde’s A Picture of Dorian Gray (“queerness” and “violence”) and WE Henley’s In Hospital (“injury” and “disease”).

It was just over a month ago that the respected institution came under fire for issuing content advice for the first Harry Potter novel, alongside other books, in an undergraduate course on children’s literature. Harry Potter, if you were wondering, has “outdated attitudes”, apparently.

Now, the University of Glasgow uses the terminology “content advice” instead of “trigger warning”, presumably to manage institutional risk and (unsuccessfully) avoid backlash and criticism over appearing woke. It is easy to get caught up in the “wokeness” debate, but I find my aggravation has little to do with the warnings themselves and rather what they reveal about the state of higher education these days.

The concept of triggers and trigger warnings is rooted in medicine and psychology and........

© Herald Scotland