Denison president wants dialogue to filter into life
Knobel says Denison needs to sustain awareness, continue diversifying
...
During Wednesday's forum, students asked the university to consider
tougher penalties for those who commit hate crimes and to revisit its decision
several years ago to cut women's, black and homosexual studies as required
courses.
...
He said he also holds students responsible for monitoring their own
behavior and that of their friends. "We have cross-cutting expectations," Knobel
said. "We need to remind ourselves of the responsibility we have. I would like
them to look one another in the eye and say those aren't the values we espouse
at Denison."
Required courses and "monitoring" others who fail the Denison code. Those that fail will face a jury of faculty, staff and students?
Another way of putting it would be to say - Submit or face a stacked jury.
GroupThink 101 will stop all 'Isms except Socialism and PCism.
UPDATE: Students have shaken up the old and false world and replaced it with a real world in which they now study, live and plan their and everyone else's future.
What have we learned?
We've shaken up the status quo on campus by picking up Denison and
turning it on its head.
Doane Administration Building can no longer sustain its safe haven
image it has exuded for so long, that quieted students by showing them
everything is okay.
We've extracted the administrators from behind their desks of Doane,
their ivory tower, and brought them down to eye-level at the flagpole. And we
told them what we want to see change.
For those of you students who still think that Denison is bubble - an
isolated, rural sanctuary of academia that will protect you from the omnipresent
evil in the "real world" - then we feel pity for you. For those of you who think
that Denison embraces a "Camp Denidoo" mentality and denies any real-life
experience by shoving you into a dorm, making you eat in a dining hall and never
having to see a consistent bill, we hope you are reading this: because if
there's one thing we can take away from this entire situation, even if you were
sitting in your room playing Halo for the past two weeks, it's that Denison is
the real world. There's no way around denying that you had any idea of what has
been going on for the last two weeks.
There are real, actual tangible human beings that have spoken out
against an institutionalized marginalization and now the healing process has
begun.
Let's see this process through and not let Thanksgiving break or the
winter breaks wear us down. Activism is a lifetime commitment, not a short-term
tactic to get what we want.
Expressing our emotions and the need for sympathy have been very
important first steps but we need to realize that true change happens when we
engage in the issues on more than the surface.
That may mean something different for us all. It might mean joining one
of the many student activist groups, researching the issues in a scholarly
manner or thinking about your privilege and how can you best help other
people.
