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Volume CXXXII, Number 17 |
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What about the minority opinion?
To the Editors:
While I applaud the recent efforts of a group of students on campus to
raise their voices against the impending war in Iraq, I question their
methods and I would suggest that their attempts to have their viewpoint
certified by the Bowdoin Student Government is indicative of a much more
serious problem on this campus.
Semantic considerations about the terms of the resolution aside, passage
of this measure by BSG would have effectively established the anti-war
stance as the official line of Bowdoin's student body. This, in spite
of the fact that by all counts more than 600 students declined to sign
the petition backing the resolution.
By asking BSG to support this resolution, the anti-war group has
attempted to appropriate the voices of all the members of the minority
who did not wish to sign the petition. Though I respect my classmates'
decisions to air their grievances about the Iraq policy, I do not care
to have them speak for me or for other members of the student body who
may be at odds with the majority with respect to this issue.
Bowdoin is an educational institution, not a nation state with a foreign
policy. As students, we are here to engage in discourse, not to act as
a collective in placing our stamp of approval upon certain policies and
ideas.
We constantly discuss the importance of respect for diversity on campus,
yet when a group of students holds up a sheet of paper with 920
signatures on it, many of us are all too quick to consider relegating
the remaining 600-odd students and their opinions to the periphery of
the discourse in question. To marginalize these students and their
views would be irresponsible and it would be detrimental to the
intellectual health of this community.
Many members of the Bowdoin community seem entirely willing to openly
mock and disparage the viewpoints that are not held by the liberal,
elite New England majority present on this campus. There is most
certainly a culture here that not only accepts, but condones this
insidious brand of political intolerance.
The present situation with the the BSG resolution is a case in point.
The prudent thing for members of the anti-war movement to do would have
been to gather a number of signatures from Bowdoin students and send
them on to the Maine Congressional delegation as evidence of individual
students' opposition to the war. Instead, they attempted work through
BSG in order to present their opinions as indicative of the viewpoint
of
the student body as a whole. Such a move was presumptuous and unfair to
the students on this campus who, for whatever reason, did not wish to
sign the petition.
I would implore my peers to recall that we are still in school and that
we are supposed to be here to learn. We are not here to tear down
posters, we are not here to shout down George Will, and we are certainly
not here to shout down our classmates. Don't we owe it to one
another--and to ourselves--to listen once in a while?
Sincerely,
Sarah Edgecomb, '03
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