In their latest quest to cater to hypersensitive activists, schools are now considering the establishment of “trigger warnings,” which are intended to protect people from taking part in class discussions and media that might offend.

The Editorial Board of USA Today just issued its own set of warnings — about this concept.

Universities are supposed to be demanding places. They should make students look in new ways at art, life, politics, love and war. And they should stand up for principles such as academic freedom and rigorous debate.

Sometimes they do these things. But too often they do not. For all of their reputation for free thinking, universities can be governed by well-meaning but stifling liberal orthodoxy.

The latest example comes in the form of the push on several campuses for “trigger warnings” — statements that advise students that a particular book or other work includes disturbing content that might trigger traumatic reactions in certain people.

For example, a course that included Things FallApart, a novel by Chinua Achebe, might include a warning that it dealt with racism, violence and colonialism. Readers of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway would have to be warned of the suicide of a pivotal character. And a course covering Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn or William Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice would have to warn students of the former’s racism and the latter’s anti-Semitism.

The practice began on the Internet, particularly with blogs dealing with such topics as violence against women and post-traumatic stress disorder. In that context, the advisories are relatively harmless, though presumably someone seeking out blogs on rape or PTSD would know what to expect.

In academia, trigger warnings are another matter entirely. At best, they are silly. By the time today’s students get to college, they’ve been exposed to all manner of sex, violence and depravity on the Internet, on TV and at the movies. It’s hard to believe that any significant number are truly shocked by something they encounter in a college classroom.

…Almost all forms of trigger warnings lend themselves to overreach, in what subjects they cover and how they are applied. According to The New Republic, the Oberlin warnings had covered works containing “racism, classism, sexism, heterosexism, cissexism, ableism, and other issues of privilege and oppression.”

Students at Wellesley College, meanwhile, used the trigger warning concept to object to a statue of an underwear-clad man, calling it “a source of apprehension, fear, and triggering thoughts regarding sexual assault.”

This is not to say that students shouldn’t be able to complain about works, or that PTSD isn’t serious. But it does mean that simplistic, coddling warnings are a terrible idea. Swaddling students in such niceties is no way to prepare them for life.