Use Tact Next Time

I face lingering disappointment after re-reading Katrina Drury’s piece “I’m Only Human,” published on Feb. 18. On the other side of the fold, a column over, Laurie Patton offers timely, levelheaded comments on the much-discussed Texas Supreme Court case, which questions the role of race in college admission procedures. In concluding remarks, President Patton calls for compassion and more “worthwhile” discourse on issues of race and identity: “Let us recommit ourselves to the spirit of understanding,” she says.

I commend Drury for adding her thoughts to the years-long campus debates on diversity, privilege and power, though I am skeptical, therein, of her efforts to reach for a “spirit of understanding.” Core to her piece is her belief that school-wide expectations surrounding political correctness and “microaggression” are a kind of white censorship and thus hold no social merit. “I don’t care about being politically correct,” Drury writes, on these expectations, “and if people don’t like my opinion, so be it... I hate having to censor every word I utter and monitor every action I make just to avoid offending someone and being branded as a racist...”

Drury’s display of hatred is worrying. She disregards and demonizes the everyday troubles of minority students, which, since my first weeks at the College, have been aired widely to me and in this paper. Her central arguments — “we have developed thin skin,” “we have the luxury to whine about people hurting our feelings” and “why can’t we all just be human and love each other” — are homespun at best. In my six semesters collaborating with Middlebury students, I have never read more uncomplicated claims or insensitive language. And what’s unsettling here is Drury’s tone in casting her assertions: it is divisive and untactful.

As Drury’s peer, I am irked. As a Middlebury student, I am discouraged by my college. As an organizer for the environment, I feel a duty to emphasize the importance of empathy. In my eight years of mobilizing around a cause, I have learned that respect and understanding is critical. There’s tact — an art form — in making a point, even to contenders; subversiveness is not part of that dance.

If all else, Drury, your words have sounded an alarm in this community; I give you that. They bear testimony that a fully-realized diversity, equity and inclusiveness at today’s Middlebury College remains a pipe dream. All things considered as a school in this milieu we are still in a stage of diagnosis, much less care or prevention.