The Tripod

Issue date: 11/14/06 Section: Opinions

Media Credit: Abi Moldover

How will the administration respond to the recent charges that it does not do enough to combat racism and intolerance on campus?


Of all the questions I have been asked over the course of the past two-plus years, this one is undoubtedly one of the most salient, and most timely, because it speaks to precisely what kind of a community of scholars we intend to be now and in the future. One of my greatest privileges is to teach a seminar each year, something I have endeavored to do for a very long time now, despite my other duties. Just a few days ago, the students in our seminar and I "finished," if one can call it that to have been tried in two class periods, our reading of Voltaire's immortal Candide. We talked at length about intolerance and hatred and the fruits of human cruelty and prejudice. That endless discussion, on the really difficult issues of life, will in the end do more than any pronouncements or edicts or policies since each of us at the end of the day is responsible only for what she or he says and for what she or he does. We should all know, if some among us may choose for whatever reason not to admit it, that racism and intolerance have no place in any society, much less in the United States, much less in an academic setting where civility and tolerance should rule the day, every day, 24/7, as our students are wont to say. When something happens, as did occur with the racial epithet being arrogantly and hurtfully scrawled across a student's white board on her door, the rules by which we should live our lives are harmed but, thankfully because of the actions of scores of our students in response, not broken.

I have always thought that society at large had at least three fundamental pathogens: poverty, prejudice, and injustice. And I have always thought that these societal pathogens were caused by ignorance. Even as idealistic as I have always been about the transformational nature of schools, I have to admit, because it is a fact from which we cannot flee even if we hoped we might, that schools can also be breeding grounds for societal injustices to fester. Examples abound from the history of the modern academy. Many of the universities in Spain were the sites of hideous practices during the Inquisition. And lest we forget that such examples can exist in times closer to our own, the great German philosopher Martin Heidegger more than casually toyed with the Nazi movement when he was the Rector of a prominent German university in the 1930s, even to the point of sporting, in a very troubling picture that has haunted me for more than forty years now, an Hitlerian mustache. Schools can - unless we are all very careful about what we say and do - fail our principles, and my greatest fear would always be that if we fail to have a free and open space here at Trinity, then I am not at all certain where, if anywhere, our students will ever experience in their entire lives such a free and open space in which differences are valued and esteemed and in which each member of our College community can feel free to speak honestly and openly and to live without prejudice.

Continued...

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