University campuses are struggling to maintain cultures where students meaningfully engage across lines of difference. Over the past 15 years, it has become increasingly common to hear students frame their experiences as traumatic, as a reason for refusing to engage in dialogue or in expressing a desire to shut speech down.
Some hypothetical examples: A college student in a Middle Eastern studies class refuses to complete an assignment on Israeli-Palestinian relations because the content is “triggering.” Another student abruptly leaves an ethics class when the topic is the use of animals in medical research. Still another student, upon hearing that there will be a campus debate on gun control and the Second Amendment, organizes a protest at the venue, becoming so disruptive that the debate cannot proceed. How are professors and administrators to respond when students say that academic conversations are so harmful or disturbing that they need to opt out, or that the content should not be permitted on campus?
Such incidents may lead educators to ask whether the harm is “real,” but this is the wrong question. Asking whether distress is genuine enough to warrant action traps us in an adversarial, unproductive debate over the validity of students’ emotional experiences. The better question is whether the only response available to them is to shut themselves or others down—an approach that denies students’ agency and resilience. We argue, instead, for modeling and supporting an agentic mindset that acknowledges discomfort while expanding students’ sense of what responses are available to them.
An Agentic Mindset
Faculty responses to students’ concerns about engaging with material they find disturbing often fall into two camps. Those in the first camp assert that students lack resilience as a result of being coddled their entire lives and so have a tendency to frame everyday struggles as catastrophic or traumatic when they are not. This may lead to the view that we need not take these concerns seriously, that students must attend classes or events covering this content or face the consequences.
The second camp argues that students’ claims of experiencing trauma, distress, discomfort or offense necessitate a university-level response. This may take the form of “trigger warnings,” policies that allow students to avoid content without consequences or even prohibitions on sensitive content altogether. Although they have very different perspectives, these camps share some common ground in that each is deciding whether an experience can or should be coded as disturbing or traumatic enough to warrant action.
We reject this dichotomy. Little is to be gained from challenging students’ claims that they have suffered trauma or harm, or their worry that academic content or experiences could be traumatic or harmful. However, that does not mean we should contribute to a narrative of helplessness or victimization that denies or dismisses students’ capacity for agentic, empowered responses. When we do this, we communicate to students that they lack strength and self-efficacy, that they cannot (or cannot learn to) manage their own discomfort and that there are people, situations and topics that they cannot handle.
What we can challenge, however, is the idea that the only response to the discomfort, stress, pain, fear or anger they are experiencing is to shut down either their own or others’ voices, or that they require a “protective” response from authority figures. Instead, we can work to shift their mindset about what is happening and what options are available to them. This shift is powerful, because mindset operates as a lens through which people interpret their experiences and guide their behavior. When students view challenging content as something they cannot handle, they experience it as threatening and respond with avoidance or shutdown. When they view the same content as something difficult but manageable—as an opportunity to practice engaging with ideas they find troubling—different responses become possible. Behavior flows from how we interpret our circumstances.
This is why mindset is often a central focus in psychotherapy. Therapists recognize that helping clients reframe how they view themselves and their situations can be transformative. However, what we’re recommending here should not be mistaken for therapy, and professors must be careful not to become armchair therapists. What we are recommending is much more modest and appropriate to the educational context: to model and reinforce a mindset of agency and capability rather than one of fragility and helplessness.
This approach does not deny students genuine support when they need it. Students with diagnosed conditions like post-traumatic stress disorder or clinical anxiety disorders deserve appropriate accommodations, just as students with any disability do. But there is a crucial difference between providing individualized support through proper channels and treating discomfort itself as something that warrants institutional protection for all students. Our concern is with the latter—with the growing expectation that universities should shield students from difficult content as a matter of course.
As educators, we have a responsibility to meet students where they are, provide the skills and resources to bring them where we want them to be, and help them meet challenges head-on, both in college and beyond. While there are many behavioral and emotional self-control strategies that could be taught to students to help them cope with overwhelming emotional experiences in the classroom, the reality is that most professors do not have the time or desire to learn them so they can reliably deliver them to their students. So we offer a simple but powerful approach to supporting such students—modeling and supporting an agentic mindset.
A 3-Step Approach
This means three things. First, it requires setting the expectation that learning and scholarship are uncomfortable, that it is OK to feel uncomfortable, and they are at college to do uncomfortable things, including regularly encountering and engaging with ideas they find distressing or offensive. This communicates that universities are analogous to gyms, where students get stronger through pushing themselves, working intellectual muscles. They’re not comfortable homes for rest and respite.
Second, it is important to acknowledge the students’ discomfort in a way that makes them feel heard. Few people—students included—will respond to feedback or demands if they feel dismissed. An acknowledgment can be as simple as, “I understand that this is really distressing for you.” Professors don’t need to understand or relate to the specific stressor—or take on the role of therapist—to empathize with someone who is struggling.
Third, explain the value of engaging in the task despite the discomfort they may feel. This should be a natural teaching moment for a professor. Professors assign a task because they believe it produces an important benefit for students and that students have the resilience to take it on. And by engaging with the material openly themselves, including by sharing their own discomfort with difficult questions, professors model the very disposition they’re asking students to develop.
Doing these three simple things—setting expectations, empathizing and explaining the value—helps remind students of the purpose of the university, of their ability to take on challenging situations, of the value in practicing and doing hard things, and of their agency to make choices that empower them to learn and grow. Even the choice to forgo a discomforting experience is agentic when it is a choice, rather than something they believe they cannot do. As students encounter such experiences throughout their college careers, trying and failing, practicing and succeeding, they build a mindset of agency, self-efficacy and resilience that will facilitate their engagement with the university and the world beyond it.
Jill Cermele is professor of psychology at Drew University and faculty fellow at Heterodox Academy.
Shira Hoffer is founding executive director of the Viewpoints Project.
Michael Strambler is associate professor at Yale School of Medicine and faculty fellow at Heterodox Academy.
