Campus Diary
Free Speech My Ass
 Wesleyan students, not unlike most college students perhaps, seem to be becoming more conservative with each passing year. What I think is most indicative of this trend is the increasing comfort with which students publicly express and organize around ideas that depart from Wesleyan's tradition of leftist thought. Tirades against Queer Alliance chalkings have moved from the anonymity of bathroom graffiti to the public forum of Wespeaks. The Wesleyan Republicans have apparently re-energized and are actively recruiting new members. A pro-life action is also currently in the works.
Many friends of mine expressed horror when I informed them of a banner hanging in the Campus Center advocating that the aforementioned pro-life group be told that their presence was not welcomed on this campus. To them, this amounted to an assault on free speech. Indeed, many students welcome the space that groups like these might open up for putatively freer discussion of certain issues at Wesleyan. I do not.
In every community there exists a permissible range of discourse. Where on the political spectrum this range falls differs from community to community-what's permissible to say in Amsterdam may be unspeakable in Austin, and vice versa.
What I like about Wesleyan is that students here can discuss issues that they cannot in many other places. In a women's studies class you can argue that all sexual differences (we're talking about anatomy here folks) are socially constructed. Would you dare make that contention in front of my Uncle Eamon over Thanksgiving dinner?In this issue, I have an article about whether or not gay men's culture encourages promiscuity and if that has played into the AIDS crisis. I still feel like I can write an article like that for straight people at Wesleyan to read without fearing that too many of them will conclude that even gay people secretly know that they are responsible for AIDS. The thing is, I'm not as sure of that as I would have been 3 years ago. I don't consider that progress.
More generally, I don't consider it progress when the range of discourse that prevails at Wesleyan increasingly mirrors the discourse of a larger American society, a discourse that has always marginalized, even vilified many of the minority groups that continue to find Wesleyan something of a haven. The more that left-thinking people acquiesce to the intrusion of right-wing discourse on to this campus, the more we contribute to the disintegration of the distinct intellectual culture that currently exists at Wesleyan. I don't know about you, but that's a culture I want to preserve.
-Aongus Burke |