In her column in this week’s Campus, President Laurie Patton stresses the importance of resilience. “Resilience,” she writes, “is one of those words we think we know, but we don’t necessarily stop to reflect on.” Starting this year, she writes, the Middlebury community will “embark on a coordinated effort to reflect on the importance of these qualities and develop programs to enhance them.”
In addition to the qualities that President Patton attributes to the word, we at the Campus define resilience as how Middlebury prepares students for the world they will face after graduation. This requires the ability to engage with points of view that we disagree with, especially those that offend us or make us uncomfortable.
Some of the aspects of this community that we most pride ourselves on – our promotion of liberal ideals and emphasis on mutual respect and safe spaces – can have the effect of insulating us and stifling a diversity of opinion. The world-at-large is not Middlebury, and we fear we are leaving here unprepared for the “unsafe spaces” that await us.
We Middlebury students have a tendency to plug our ears and avoid listening to dissenting opinions instead of learning from them or challenging them. For example, in 2012, Charles A. Dana Professor of Political Science Murray Dry was vilified for taking a legalistic view of affirmative action at a panel designed to showcase a diversity of opinions. A year later, the campus was in uproar over a lecture by University of Pennsylvania Law Professor Amy Wax, some students even opting to hold up signs reading “racist.” Similarly, some felt that Middlebury’s invitation to Harvey Mansfield last year was an implicit endorsement of his social views, even claiming he invoked feelings of fear. And when Chance the Rapper came to perform, we asked him to censor his most controversial lyrics, and then demanded a forum to debrief how the whole ordeal made us feel.
This tendency to react to the uncomfortable with outrage often takes the place of necessary critical discourse. Professor Dry is far from racist, though one could reasonably argue that the legal view he articulated (which is not necessarily the one he actually holds) has racist components. Amy Wax is decidedly less far from racism, but she is also a serious social scientist, and her findings deserve to be met with thoughtful discourse and criticism rather than blanket labels. Similarly, the seemingly endless conversation surrounding Chance the Rapper’s lyrics overshadowed a much more meaningful discussion that could have taken place about the pervasiveness of homophobia in Hip Hop music. We must learn to disagree without shutting down, refusing to listen and labeling.
Embracing discomfort is critical to our liberal arts education. The most important thing we will each take away from Middlebury is the ability to think critically and clearly communicate our ideas. In order to effectively hone these skills, we need our faculty to challenge the preconceived notions many of us hold and for students who disagree with the liberal status quo to be able to speak up.
In an era of extreme political polarization, it is more important than ever that we emerge from our cocoons of like-mindedness or the illusion of like-mindedness. We fear that students at many institutions have learned to change their language to conform to political correctness, without truly understanding what makes those very words offensive. It is only by engaging with ideas that offend us that we can learn and ultimately motivate change. We all agree that diversity is important, and now we must learn to make room for diversity of opinion. We all undoubtedly have a lot to learn from people who view the world differently than we do.
This is not to say that everything is in-bounds. Hate speech, threats and harassment have no place in this community, nor will they ever. Developing a better understanding of these concepts will make way for the conversations we so badly need to have on campus.
Ultimately, this culture of protectiveness is not unique to Middlebury. As the well-read Atlantic Monthly article, The Coddling of the American Mind discussed, it has developed at many colleges and universities across the country. Following the recent Atlantic and New Yorker pieces on the topic of political correctness gone awry, the conversation seems to be popping up everywhere. Many observers attribute this trend to the entitlement students feel as consumers of their own educations.
Somewhere along the way we lost our ability to engage in discourse, and it is doing us a disservice. As we usher in a new academic year and a new college president, we as an editorial board will be pushing the envelope a bit more. Our goal? To encourage disagreement and dialogue—and not the anonymous, online kind. We strongly urge all students to lean into discomfort, write an op-ed if you have something to say and have a resilient year.
The Coddling of the Middlebury Mind
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