Following the murder of Sarah Everard, a university withdrew a play that makes reference to sexual assault from an undergraduate literary programme, a vice chancellor told MPs yesterday.
August Strindberg’s 1888 novel Miss Julie, which discusses suicide, was “permanently deleted” by the University of Sussex after students raised concerns about the text’s possible “psychological” and “emotional repercussions.”
In March of last year, Metropolitan Police officer Wayne Couzens abducted, raped, and killed Sarah.
It happens after university administrators came under fire for’mollycoddling’ and patronising students after more than 1,000 works were given trigger warnings or were taken off reading lists because of their ‘difficult’ content.
The decision was made to replace it with a different text that is equally challenging for students but is not focused on those issues, according to Professor Sasha Roseneil, the new vice chancellor of Sussex.
She made this statement to the Commons education committee in the wake of the Sarah Everard scandal, Everyone’s Invited, and much media attention on sexual violence experienced by young women.
We don’t advocate for book bans; in fact, the reverse of that is what we do.
According to a recent inquiry, at least eleven universities, including three from the prestigious Russell Group, have either removed or made optional certain texts in fear they hurt or offend students.
The 2017 Pulitzer Prize winner The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead was one of the manuscripts that was impacted.
Trigger warnings were also placed on the writings of famous authors including Geoffrey Chaucer, William Shakespeare, Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte, Charles Dickens, and Agatha Christie.
Miss Julie was briefly withdrawn from one Spring Term subject this academic year owing to genuine concerns about the profound sadness of recent student suicides, according to a University of Sussex official.
We don’t remove books from reading lists permanently, but just as at other colleges, we regularly examine our judgments about required reading, as is customary in the industry.
We anticipate Miss Julie will be featured on the Spring 2023 reading list for this module, just as she was in 2020 and 2021.