Why would college students need trauma-informed classrooms? The MassBay Community College project

CATEGORY: CONTROL OF LANGUAGE AND IDEAS

Jeanie Tietjen Ph.D., Director of MassBay trauma institute

Source: Framingham Source
Read time: 1.5 minutes plus 1-minute video
 
This Happened
In December 2024, MassBay Community College posted a promotion for a new educational video that explains “the urgency of adopting trauma-informed practices in higher education.”
 
Who Did This?
The video is a product of the Institute for Trauma, Adversity, and Resilience in Higher Education of MassBay Community College. The Institute aims at “transforming how higher education addresses the impact of trauma and adversity on adult learners.”
Jeanie Tietjen Ph.D., a professor of English, founded the Institute in 2009 and continues to run it. She has conducted no research and published no papers on trauma or PTSD. She authored one book chapter on trauma-informed practices in colleges.
 
The Premise
The premise of the Institute, and the topic of the video, is that adult learners who have experienced trauma cannot succeed in the classroom unless widespread accommodations are provided for them.
The five-minute video explains an ominous situation. The 68-second clips from the video (below) shows several scenes explaining the Institute’s beliefs about the insidiousness of trauma.

In addition, the Institute provides other resources describing transgender as a valid construct, perceived mistreatment on campuses causes mental and physical problems for lesbian and gay individuals, and perceived racial discrimination is the equivalent of trauma.
 
Analysis
Readers will recognize many problematic concepts within the Institute’s approach. The premise of The Body Keeps The Score—that trauma permanently damages brains, has been debunked (see here). ACEs is unproven primarily because one hundred percent of ACE studies are cross-sectional and no biological mechanism has been validated (see here). Complex PTSD—the source of the catchphrase “It’s What Happened to You”—is not a real disorder, and instead is a cultural phenomenon of research activists (see here).

The video makes a unique contribution to the Fragilism movement with the claim that emotional, cognitive, and functional harms befall students within classrooms if their previous traumas are not addressed.
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​Namely, if trauma is not acknowledged in a classroom, it is the professor’s fault that a student fails to learn. There is, of course, no evidence to support this extraordinary claim.
 
Why Is This Happening?
This is another example of the liberal hegemony that has captured academic institutions and spreads false claims to promote a neo-Marxist interpretation of human nature in the humanities and social sciences.

Their intent is to install a false intellectual framework about Fragilism, that the world is divided into oppressed and oppressors, and all disparities in society are due to environmental causes.
If the professors promoting trauma were truly an altruistic group interested in evidence instead of ideology, these concepts would be widely exposed as fallacies. But with the capture of the social sciences in academia—with over 90% of professors liberal—there are hardly any serious debates (see here).

[The Institute's full 5-minute is available here.]