System administration

Editorial: Broken dialogue

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.

Editorial: Safety in numbers

The sexual assault that occurred on Tuesday has left campus in a state of shock. While similar incidents may be a more common reality outside of Bowdoin, it’s greatly distressing to find that such a horrifying act of random violence could happen here. Our thoughts are with the victim, and with all the members of the Bowdoin community deeply affected by this attack.
As college students, a number of resources for dealing with sexual assault are available to us. This year’s Clery Report recorded 20 sex offenses in the 2014 calendar year, and others almost surely went unreported. We’re trained—formally and otherwise—to think about sexual assault in specific ways that aim to confront this unique problem of sexual assault on college campuses. We’re told that the victims of sexual assault usually know their attacker, that alcohol is involved in a large percentage of assaults on campus, and that a culture of affirmative consent is key to stopping sexual assault before it happens. We’re told that the notion of a stranger entering your room is a narrow and rare conception of what sexual assault is for college students. All of this education is accurate and necessary, but it also makes it all the more jarring when an incident like this happens.
While each student may have felt a different level of safety at Bowdoin before this event, many of us, particularly women, feel significantly less safe this week. Behaviors we take for granted—jogging without a cell phone, wandering home from a party alone, leaving a door propped open for a roommate—will be given up by many students after what happened on Tuesday. These everyday activities, rarely second-guessed, were reflections of a collective belief that Brunswick and Bowdoin are generally safe. Every time a student makes a conscious effort to avoid such a behavior will be an implicit statement that campus is perhaps not as safe as we once thought. While these privileges of safety are small individually, losing them all at once profoundly affects how we perceive our environment.
There’s no shortcut to regaining the sense of security that many of us had until this week. Many of us are scared, and unfortunately, there’s no way that we can be entirely comforted after an incident like this. There are things that help, however. Student affairs staff have been on hand at 24 College Street so students can convene there, providing many students a way to cope with the emotional toll that an incident like this takes. In less formal settings, students have found comfort through simply sharing their feelings and offering support to friends. This week, we lost some of the small privileges of our experience at Bowdoin and in Brunswick. Coming together as a community will continue to help us slowly regain some sense of security.
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.

November 6, 2015

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.

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