Broken dialogue

Editorial: Commit to memory

Last weekend, the Board of Trustees approved President Clayton Rose’s proposal to terminate the Jefferson Davis Award—an academic honor given to a student excelling in the study of constitutional law. In President Rose’s words, “It is inappropriate for Bowdoin College to bestow an annual award that continues to honor a man whose mission was to preserve and institutionalize slavery.” This change was a necessary one, perhaps even overdue. The Jefferson Davis Award had been given out annually since 1973, and those who saw it awarded year after year may have assumed its inevitability. In President Rose’s motion to discontinue the award, we saw for the first time the benefit of bringing in a president with no previous ties to the College. Armed with a fresh set of eyes, he saw the award as the outdated relic that it was.
Last month, columnist Maya Reyes ’16 wrote an Op-Ed for the Orient titled “Franklin Pierce’s legacy deserves more recognition and discussion,” in which she called on the Bowdoin community to have “more conversations about the actions and products of Bowdoin that we aren’t so proud of.” Pierce—who graduated from Bowdoin in 1824—was a President guided by a troubling ideology. He ardently enforced the Fugitive Slave Act and opposed the abolitionist movement. Likewise, in a column this week about the Jefferson Davis Award, columnist Adira Polite ’18 writes, “America desperately needs to address its dark past and present in order to achieve progress. This is true in the context of Bowdoin as well.” Both Reyes and Polite are correct: the College must confront the parts of its history we might prefer to forget.
In 1858, Jefferson Davis was visiting southern Maine when the College awarded him an honorary degree at commencement. He was the lone southerner at the ceremonies, and another honorary degree recipient that afternoon was prominent Maine abolitionist William Pitt Fessenden. Every element of the event was fraught with contention. Bowdoin appeared to feel obligated to give an honorary degree to a man of Davis’ stature, but many students and local media outlets were at odds with his pro-slavery politics. And though Davis was certainly out of place on campus, he was not without a Bowdoin connection: he had served as Secretary of War under Franklin Pierce.
These are rich histories, compelling simply as narratives, but they also contain lessons. We aren’t necessarily proud of our historical associations with these men, and their stories are all the more worth telling for that fact. Seeing how representatives of Bowdoin have fallen on the wrong side of moral issues in years past helps us avoid assuming our own infallibility as an institution. Advocates for the removal of the Confederate flag at the South Carolina State Capitol this past summer argued that the flag did not belong at a government site but rather in a museum. It is in a similar way that Bowdoin should treat the memories of men like Davis and Pierce. They may not deserve to be honored, but they certainly need to be remembered.
This editorial represents the majority view of the Bowdoin Orient’s editorial board, which is comprised of John Branch, Sam Chase, Matthew Gutschenritter, Emma Peters and Nicole Wetsman.

Editorial: System administration

Signs containing the phrase “#AStatementIsNotEnough” were posted throughout campus last Thursday night, signifying some students’ dissatisfaction with the administration’s response to the sailing team’s “gangster” party. In a protest this Wednesday, students wore duct tape over their mouths—representing the silencing of minority voices—to further express disapproval with how the College handles racial issues on campus. Many felt that the reaction emails sent by administrators were lacking in concrete solutions, and placed the burden on students to foster future discussions.
In his campus wide email, President Clayton Rose recounted meeting with student leaders from various multicultural groups over the weekend, writing, “they offered thoughtful ideas that we will be discussing with them soon.” While this statement is vague, and more direct attention to racial issues could have been paid even before the “gangster” party, it’s unclear what concrete action we should expect from the College so soon after the party happened.
Even so, the tension between the College’s desire to appear responsive to student concerns and its inability to take immediate action on complicated problems has fallen hardest on the students affected by these issues in the first place. They have been asked to devote long hours on top of their usual course load and activities to facilitating dialogue. There is no institutional course of action for responding to incidents like the “gangster” party, but the administration cannot place the responsibility of reacting to racial issues entirely on students of color.
There is plenty of work the administration simply cannot do. What happens off campus—say, when a car of strangers yells racial slurs at a student walking on Maine Street—is out of the administration’s control. What the administration can do, however, is to ensure that there are support systems in place when issues like this arise.
In the Orient’s article on faculty diversity this week, several people spoke about the importance of faculty mentors who, coming from similar backgrounds as students of color, can empathize with the unique issues they face and provide guidance as these students navigate their time at Bowdoin. The last two weeks have brought the importance of this idea into sharp focus. Bowdoin as an institution may have little power to control isolated bias incidents, but the decisions it makes about who works here, the roles that they play and the training they receive, shape the environment in which we preempt and respond to these incidents. What’s more, the benefits of a more diverse faculty extend far beyond responding to incidents of racial bias. A more diverse faculty could foster a culture that’s more capable of discussing race to begin with, preventing events like the “gangster” party from happening in the first place.
This editorial represents the majority view of the Bowdoin Orient’s editorial board, which is comprised of John Branch, Sam Chase, Matthew Gutschenritter, Emma Peters and Nicole Wetsman.

Editorial

This piece represents the opinion of The Bowdoin Orient editorial board.

October 30, 2015

Many students who were harmed by the sailing team’s “gangster” party last Thursday have stepped up in its wake to express their frustration and educate their peers in public forums. Whether it be at Wednesday night’s packed BSG meeting or in the pages of the Orient, students who saw their culture reduced to a crude stereotype came forward wholeheartedly, sharing intensely personal experiences and leaving themselves vulnerable in sincere hope of producing positive change on Bowdoin’s campus.

Less inspiring were the dialectical contributions of those on campus who are unconvinced of the severity of racist cultural appropriation. In response to Dean Tim Foster’s campus-wide email condemning the incident, some students took to Yik Yak to share posts that were ignorant at best, and in some cases outright hostile. Worsening the effects of the original incident, these anonymous posts created a threatening environment for the students at which they were directed. The idea that your lab partner or the person in front of you in line at Thorne might be covertly, yet publicly, attacking the validity of your emotions is enormously disturbing. Hiding behind anonymity to post malicious messages is a display of pure cowardice.

We’ve seen this pattern before. As is often the case with incidents of this nature, administrators and many students are calling for a renewed focus on conversation and dialogue. Dialogue is happening, but it’s not the kind they’re hoping for. Unfortunately, productive dialogue is an unlikely result given our current pattern of responses. Statements from the administration that present an official position of the institution, valid and necessary as they may be, create a situation in which honestly conflicted students—distinct from those who simply troll on anonymous forums—are reluctant to speak out publicly because they don’t want their opinions to be seen as being at odds with the College’s core values.

It is common knowledge on campus that divergent viewpoints exist, but, despite calls like Foster’s for “constructive engagement,” so-called public dialogues always seem to play out as one-sided discussions. We believe that the College should indeed take official positions on moral issues about which it feels strongly, but it appears that this prevents earnest questioning on the finer points of issues as complex as cultural appropriation. This conflict in the College’s stated goals does not have an easy solution, but it is an issue our campus would do well to acknowledge.

Unfortunately, incidents of racism like the “gangster” party are not uncommon at Bowdoin and similar institutions, and this month’s will probably not be the last. The pattern shows that there is still a population here unwilling to participate in the public dialogue so many of us are asking for. Moving forward, we must consider how to break this cycle of asymmetrical dialogue in which students putting themselves on the line are made to feel unsafe, and students speaking anonymously don’t feel compelled to identify themselves.

This editorial represents the majority view of the Bowdoin Orient’s editorial board, which is comprised of John Branch, Sam Chase, Matthew Gutschenritter, Emma Peters and Nicole Wetsman.

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