Notes from the Desk - 04/29/10

Nestled in beautiful Vermont, in one of the most liberal states in the nation, Middlebury College is an open and accepting community, where everyone can be whatever they want. That’s what we tell ourselves. Well, we tell ourselves a lie.

The acts of homophobic graffiti over the last two weeks tell me as much. Without question, openly gay and lesbian students have a difficult time here, facing repeated acts of intolerance. These actions deserve our attention and a zero tolerance policy towards offenders, but we should not assume they are the only members of the community whose lives are continually judged.

We judge people everyday. We group students into categories and then dismiss them as potential friends.

The international students only want to eat by themselves and are anti-social. The richest students are snobs and wouldn’t want to associate with others.

Athletes don’t care about academics and cannot possibly add anything positive to classes. WRMC kids are weird and probably just use a lot of drugs. Weybridge kids only eat weird grains and ride bikes around. Xenia kids are nerds who don’t drink.

Of course, I’m grossly overgeneralizing when I fault the community for overgeneralizing. There are plenty of people in this community who make a concerted effort to meet and greet all sorts of people, integrating them into their friend groups.

However, in a general sense, we, and I include myself here, allow these different groups of students to remain separate.

This is a pity. Above all else, our perceived differences are much smaller than we might initially believe. My freshman fall, I made a great friend in a really unlikely place. One day, I started chatting with a football player at the end of my hall. We discovered that we shared a love of chess and began playing nightly. People often chuckled at us — an unlikely pair of friends to be sure — but our nightly games and the conversations that went with them were some of my favorite memories from freshman year.

I look with amazement at my group of close friends. Geographically, I live with people from South Dakota, Washington, California, Tennessee and Pennsylvania. Our geographic diversity has led to many conversations and jokes but has also brought me vast amounts of new knowledge about the United States.

I’m friends with an aspiring rapper from New Hampshire, a relative of Sir Isaac Newton from Connecticut, an amazingly creative and unendingly energetic person from Tennessee, an intern from Vice-President Biden’s office from Delaware, a native of the Cheddar cheese capital from Vermont and a fellow lover of “Monk” from Washington state.

Even within people from the same city, the amount of diversity is enormous. From “right outside of Boston” comes one of the best creative writers I’ve ever read, an awesome a capella singer and someone who’s discovering how cell phones have changed the Chinese language. The Campus has around 7 editors from the Washington D.C. area (!), but we work in different sections and have radically different personalities. Two of my friends went to the same high school in Washington State. One is one of the best flutists I’ve ever heard and the other works on behalf of undocumented workers.

Within my group of friends, I have international students, athletes, straight people, homosexual people, women, men, students on financial aid, students with trust funds, people who love the environment, students of color, people who love music, chronic monogamists, chronic non-monogamists and so much more.

My point is simple. We’re all different. Very different. Grouping people by athletic ability, race, sex, financial status, country of origin, sexual preference or whatever else, does not fairly represent the diversity in all of us and ultimately cheapens the community.

I’m not saying you have to love everyone. Far from it. There are lots of people who don’t add much to the community. However, whether they play sports or what their sexual orientation is does not determine that. We should judge people on an individual basis, and not based on artificial (and convenient) categories.

Middlebury wouldn’t have been the same without my friends. I say thank you to every one of them. At the same time, I can’t help but wonder what would have happened had I been more open-minded.

Next time you see that kid on your hall who always wears the San Francisco Giants cap, strike up a conversation.

Get to know the kid from Venezuela in your philosophy class. Ask the kid from Xenia what he’s listening to on his iPod. Invite someone sitting alone to join you at dinner.

It is stepping outside of your comfort zone, but we’re too small of a school not to. You’ll be glad you did.