Do Oxford students really need trigger warnings?

It is freshers’ week on campus. Brand new students get to make friends, get drunk and find their way around university. The excitement culminates with freshers’ fair, a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to find your tribe by joining everything from the paragliding club to the Mao appreciation society. Who cares if you never attend a single meeting? For one brief moment, you can flirt with the person you might become.

Freshers’ fairs offer new students a glimpse of the intellectual and political possibilities on offer at university. But sadly not at Oxford. This year, Oxford University’s freshers’ fair comes with a big fat trigger warning. Apologies. I should of course have prefaced that sizeist statement with ‘Trigger Warning: body shaming.’ And to be totally accurate, it is not one big fat trigger warning on the whole fair but a multitude of little warnings, one for each stall deemed to be promoting activities or ideas those in charge think new students might find distressing.