Is the word "field" part of the trigger warnings in US universities?

Question

Note: I am French, we do not really have the concept of "trigger warnings", except during the national TV news where there would be sometimes a warning about a violent scene.

In a video interview (in French) for the newspaper Le Figaro, Éric Naulleau mentioned that in American universities, the word field is a "trigger word" (the lecturer must warn about it). So the expression Magnetic fields" would be subject to a "trigger warning" because field → cotton fields → slavery.

The transcript of the video (from 1:56) is below. This is a casual discussion in the street with a journalist, so I removed some irrelevant side tracks/opinions to just keep the factual description.

le prof doit avertir (...) et le mot "field", "champs" fait partie des avertissements que l'on doit faire parce que vous dites "champ de connaissances” par exemple, mais "champs” c'est aussi "champs de coton" et donc c'est en rapport avec l'esclavage. Donc il y a des étudiants, des élèves qui se disent offensés ou choqués quand ils entendent "fields" parce que ça a un rapport avec l'esclavage. (...) Donc les "champs magnétiques", on ne pourrait pas les enseigner dans certains campus.

This is my translation

the teacher has to warn [that they will use some trigger words] and the word "field" is part of the warnings words because you say "field of knowledge" for instance, but "field" is also "cotton field" and so this is related to slavery. So there are students, pupils that claim to be offended or shocked when they hear "fields" because this is related to slavery (...) So "magnetic fields" could not be taught on some campuses

Is this actually the case? (either globally, or on some campuses)

Note about notability: Le Figaro is one of the top three newspapers in France, oriented "right" (but this is "French right", that would be more or less "Democrats center" in the US). Éric Naulleau is a writer, journalist, ... - someone we would at least have heard of in France.

Answer 1

Here is something that I think has a decent chance of being what Naulleau was referring to, even though the details differ from the description. It isn't a matter of field being treated as a "trigger word" that lecturers must warn about: rather, it is a memo that was sent when a department changed its name from "Office of Field Education" to "Office of Practicum Education". The use of the word "field" in the context of expressions like "magnetic fields" doesn't seem to be what the memo is about (I suspect that magnetic fields do not have a large place in the curriculum of the USC Suzanne Dworak-Peck School of Social Work).

The memo suggests the use of "field" in the context of phrases like "field education" could be harmful or exclusionary, but does not suggest warning for the word's presence. Rather, it suggests using revised terminology ("practicum education"). This is not directly related to the topic of trigger warnings; it is more similar to arguments about replacing technical terminology like "master-slave" or "whitelist/blacklist" with alternatives that are supposed to be more inclusive.

"A USC office removes 'field' from its curriculum, citing possible racist connotations" (NPR, updated January 14, 2023, by Giulia Heyward)

An office within the University of Southern California's School of Social Work says it is removing the term "field" from its curriculum because it may have racist connotations related to slavery.

The newly renamed Office of Practicum Education, formerly known as the Office of Field Education, within the university's Suzanne-Dworak-Peck School of Social Work, is making the change in order to be more inclusive, according to a memo sent out to faculty and students this week and obtained by NPR.

"This change supports anti-racist social work practice by replacing language that could be considered anti-Black or anti-immigrant in favor of inclusive language," the memo reads. "Language can be powerful, and phrases such as 'going into the field' or 'field work' may have connotations for descendants of slavery and immigrant workers that are not benign."

The article links to a tweet by Houman David Hemmati that gave the text of the letter as follows:

As the article notes, this memo received some public attention, which is why I think it's plausible that the idea of lecturers giving trigger warnings for the word "field" is a garbled reference to this. It seems some other social work programs have also made similar terminological changes; the following blog post mentions Cal State Northridge and Smith College: Knowledge is under attack, and “fieldwork” isn’t the problem (by Philip N. Cohen, May 12, 2023, Family Inequality).

Of course, there's a chance that rather than inaccurately describing this memo, Naulleau is accurately describing some other incident that I'm not aware of. As the comments have mentioned, there is no such thing as a standard list of trigger warnings that all US universities follow; this means that it would definitely be inaccurate to say without qualification that giving trigger warnings for the word "field" is something that US universities do, but it's also difficult to be 100% certain that it has never happened at all in any US university.

For a bit of background on the concept of trigger warnings in higher education, here is another NPR article: "Half Of Professors In NPR Ed Survey Have Used 'Trigger Warnings'" (September 7, 2016, All Things Considered, by Anya Kamenetz). It notes that of the college faculty respondents that reported giving warnings about content in class material, the majority did so as a matter of personal judgement, not at student request or to comply with a policy, and "only 1.8 percent said, as of last fall, that their institutions had any official policies about their use." So keep in mind that professors giving trigger warnings is not only unstandardized and far from universal, but also often not a matter of official university policy. Based on the information in the article, as well as my own experience, I highly doubt that any US university has an official policy that would prevent professors or lecturers from using the phrase "magnetic fields" in instruction, or require them to warn their students about it.

Certainly, no such policy is in place at USC. After the memo became a topic of public discussion, the interim provost and senior vice president for academic affairs, Elizabeth A. Graddy, stated in an email to The Washington Times that

The university does not maintain a list of banned or discouraged words. We will continue to use words – including ‘field’ – that accurately encompass and describe our work and research

("USC to keep using word ‘field’ despite departmental ban over slavery ‘connotations’", Valerie Richardson - The Washington Times - Thursday, January 12, 2023)

Answer 2

It appears to be a specific, not limited to universities, ban on phrases such as 'work in the field', 'field work', etc.

It's not a ban on use of 'magnetic fields', vector fields, and so on.

The State of Michigan Department of Health and Human Services also banned the term 'field workers' in January 2023.

I can find no evidence that inclusive language guides have identified 'field work' as a phrase that is harmful to the descendants of slaves, before around the beginning of 2023.

The word 'field' has also been identified as harmful for a different reason. Oxfam says that it is offensive to refer to a visit to an Oxfam project as a 'field visit', when they would not refer to a visit to New York as a 'field visit'. https://oxfamilibrary.openrepository.com/bitstream/10546/621487/4/gd-inclusive-language-guide-130323-en.pdf They say this is 'colonial'. So instead of saying a 'field visit to Botswana', we must now say a 'visit to Botswana'. This appears to be obfuscatory, as the word 'field' gave information, that it was a visit to a site where Oxfam is doing work, whereas if we just refer to 'visit', it's no longer clear if we were attending an international conference, an active project, or whatever.

The claim that the phrase 'field work' triggers the descendants of slaves who worked in fields does not seem to be that widely held. USC is noted for a previous extreme response to normal phrases, such as when they suspended a professor of business communication for saying 那个, which is pronounced similarly to the word 'nigger'. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/09/fight-against-words-sound-like-are-not-slurs/616404/ It is likely therefore that bans on referring to 'field work' are not that common in US academia.