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OFFICIAL STATEMENT #2 OF BC PRESIDENT JUDITH SHAPIRO February 3, 2004 The following reflections have been prompted by the way in which The Fed cartoon and other objectionable events have played out in the recent life of the University community. First, I have been struck by the extent to which attention has been focused on the emotional pain suffered by students belonging both to the offended and offending groups. Surely, racist and sexist acts are hurtful and cause pain. Surely also, it is painful to become an object of rejection and condemnation by one’s peers. Those who suffer pain should receive appropriate support, especially those who belong to the group more sinned against than sinning. But I would have liked to see a somewhat more robust ratio of thought to feeling. Or, rather, a different mix of thought and feeling. Let me try to explain. I was particularly struck by the apparent expectation on the part of many (though not all) of the offending parties that they should be let off the hook right away if they followed up some appalling and unacceptable piece of behavior with an apology. While they acknowledged their fault and asserted their willingness to engage in dialogue, they seemed to resent being made to feel bad about themselves. They seemed to assume that rejection should last a mere fleeting moment before they were once again enfolded in the warm embrace of their peers and the whole matter could be safely kicked into community-forums-on-diversity gear. But getting let off the hook too easily is likely to lead only to more refined levels of hypocrisy. One reason that a lot of students seem to be so blame-averse may be the extent to which they have been running on a fast track of having to do everything right. Given such pressure, many of them may have understandably come to be more worried about the content of their careers than the content of their characters. Driven to succeed academically now and into their future lives, some of our students may be missing an experience that promotes learning in a powerful way: failure. Failure brings considerable discomfort in its wake. In this case, the community, including me, came down on The Fed like a ton of bricks. In the wake of the cartoon’s publication, the editors of The Fed encountered rejection on a massive scale, which is an extremely painful experience. They have felt especially put-upon, given that nothing comparably harsh had happened in response to previous offenses, but that’s what you get when you are the straw that breaks the camel’s back. They were, in essence, hit on the head with a social two by four and their complacency was shaken to the roots. I should note, in this context, that I have had some good and productive conversation with the editor-in-chief of The Fed in the days since the sorry event involving her paper. I had the occasion to learn that she does not, in fact, carry the authority and responsibility that should go with her title and does not get to make the final call on the publication of such things as the offending cartoon. This is something that I hope will change, since student publications that do their business this way are impeding progress toward individual accountability, which is particularly important for persons in positions of leadership. Turning to how protest was expressed, an initial form of demonstration in the student community was a highly visible silent protest, with students wearing signs that indicated the social and psychological silencing they experienced when confronted with racism. Many students who witnessed this found it a moving and effective form of protest. My own reaction was to wish for a sign that would have been overly wordy, but might have captured some of the true feelings of the protesters more effectively: "I am sick and tired of having to put up with this kind of garbage decades after other people were marching around with signs saying ‘We Shall Overcome.’ " On the subject of my own protest predilections, I also rather favor wit and satire as bracing complements to the serious soul- searching and analysis that needs to occur in times of trouble. For example, a Saturday Night Live-type sketch of a senior editorial meeting at The Fed would have offered so many possibilities. If the members of the Columbia University Marching Band had wanted to move up to something more sophisticated and clever, they might have tried their hand at that one. Making fun of something does not mean that it is not serious. Charlie Chaplin and Mel Brooks, among others, successfully made fun of Hitler, who is as serious as a subject gets. While not everyone considered this an appropriate topic for humor, and while many were surely offended, few could have thought that Chaplin or Brooks were actually Nazis. With comedy, you have to have the timing and the context right, and the audience has to be sufficiently clear about your intentions. Make no mistake, I believe that ultimately we must engage one another with love, understanding, and respect if we hope to reach one another’s hearts and minds. We need to understand why our adversaries behave the way they do and that requires some listening to them, even suspending judgment for the purposes of truly hearing what they are saying. There is probably a fair amount of anxiety, insecurity, and even fear behind the actions of those who feel a need to insult people different from them. Their behavior is not likely to change until something touches and addresses those deeper levels of feeling. Make no mistake about this either: The life of the mind is not about brainwashing. The point is not to make others share all of our beliefs. Rather, the point is that members of the community be prepared to subject their values and beliefs to challenge. That they understand the standards of success in upholding a position – standards of truth and humanity that this academic community holds dear. That they have the courage and integrity to cleave to unpopular positions in the face of disapproval if they truly believe in them. And that they be prepared to change their minds if a more compelling argument or vision is presented. And now, what is to be done? We will be exploring that together in the days to come. Policies and procedures will be reviewed. Forums for more effective interchange must be created. I fear, though, that students will focus too much on official policies and formal administrative initiatives, and that a major lesson of this episode will thus be lost. What actually happened here serves as an illustration of how societies operate when their norms and values have been violated. Legalistic codes and bureaucratic processes - as useful as they may be for certain purposes - are no proper substitute for the informal mechanisms of social control available to all human communities. There is no shortcut around conflict, distress, and hurt feelings; we go through them to get to the other side. It seems to me that our main focus now should be two-fold: On what we might call the macro-level, we should bring to bear our tools of social, cultural, and historical analysis to understand why the incidents that have so disturbed us are occurring in our community at this time. On the micro-level, we should be turning our attention to the everyday patterns of life on our campuses. There is a tendency for our attention to be riveted by "crises" like the Marching Band, or the bake sale, or the cartoon in The Fed. But this can leave intact the daily and unconscious habits of our lives – how we meet and greet one another, how we form friendships, what makes us laugh, how we deal with minor social discomforts and risks. It is at this level that many consequential problems lie and at this level that solutions must be sought.
Judith Shapiro |