FOI_25-165 Content warnings for reading materials

Date of response: 18 June 2025

We have now considered your request of 03 June 2025 for the following information:

Question 1. Please could you provide a list of books and texts used by the university's Department of English, Department of History and Department of Politics (and International Relations) which have been flagged as requiring recommendations or suggestions of content warnings to alert students to potentially distressing content, on reading lists or in lectures and seminars/tutorials.

Question 2. Please could you also include the reason why there is a content warning on each book/text.

If creating this list would surpass the threshold for the timescale, please could you remove the Department of Politics from the list. If it still surpasses the timescale, please could you create a list just for the books and texts which have suggestions of content warnings too.

And if that is still over the threshold, please could you also not add the reason why there is a content warning on each book/text.

Our response:

We regret that on this occasion it is not possible to provide the requested information.

Under Section 1 of the Freedom of Information Act, we can confirm that the University does hold the information requested, however on this occasion it is not possible for us to provide any of the information relating to content warnings and the reasons why books/texts may have been flagged as requiring a content warning.

We have determined that the cost of finding and assembling the requested information will exceed the ‘appropriate limit’ as defined by section 12 of the Act and the Freedom of Information and Data Protection (Appropriate Limit and Fees) Regulations 2004/3244.

'The ‘appropriate limit’ of £450, which equates to 18 hours’ work, as defined by the Information Commissioner’s Office, can relate to one request in its entirety or to a series of linked requests. If the University cannot locate, retrieve and extract some or all of the requested information within the 18 hours we are not obliged to retrieve any of the requested information.

Information relating to books and texts flagged as requiring a content warning, as well as the reasons for those warnings, may be held within several locations. Namely within our teaching and learning platform, Tallis, within individual module outlines, notes entered against modules within Tallis, and within data held by individual module organisers within the school or Literature, Drama and Creative Writing (LDC), our School of Politics, Philosophy and area studies (PPL) and our School of History and Arts (HIS). There is no central record of where this information is held.

As of the date of your request we have identified 377 modules with reading lists, and a total of 4,897 notes associated with modules within PPL, HIS and LDC, which may fall into the scope of your request. This does not count any information held separately by module organisers or seminar leads responsible for these modules. The only way of identifying, extracting and recording the exact information you seek would be to interrogate each individual note or reading list manually.

We have calculated it would take one minute per reading list item and note for student, or 87 hours, to locate and manually interrogate each individual item/reading list. Which exceeds the appropriate time-limit as outlined above.

Further to this, to extract information held to the reasons why any content warnings have been assigned to those reading lists would require further searching of files and documentation held by module organisers or seminar leads; the cost of finding and assembling any data held by module organisers is not included in our calculations.

Under section 16 of the Act, and to assist you in formulating a request to which we can respond, we may be able to provide a response to question 1 of your request, should you refine your request to one course or module.

Please note we have not considered whether any exemptions may apply to such a request.

We should also point out that any revised request you submit will be treated as a new FOI request, and the 20 working-day time-limit will begin again.

We are sorry we cannot provide the data you requested, but trust this response explains our position.

FOI_25-165 Content warnings for reading materials