Letter to the Editor | Alum responds to campus conflict

I'm very happy to be able to read The Miscellany News on-line. Please keep up the good work. It looks like Vassar hasn't changed a bit. I just read about this racial situation involving MICA. It brought back bitter memories of my graduation, which took place shortly after one of the ugliest racial witch hunts I have ever witnessed. I think all the militant rallies, the "open forums" where every white person knows what he's allowed to say while nonwhites can get away with anything, and the hysterical ultimatums of some faculty members, only make things more racially unsafe for everyone.

Yet, I also had so many refreshing conversations with other students—most of them strangers to me—as I sought to report to that “forum” what students really thought about my class’s controversy. A lot of them really wanted to talk, and I found myself really wanting to listen. These were mostly people who weren't part of my crowd at all, and here I was talking to them about something very serious and value-based, but for a few minutes at a time, I felt connected to something much greater than myself. That's right, I found the real open forum.

This is almost unrelated, but I still wonder sometimes that a near riot didn't result from what I wrote a couple of years ago on gay marriage. I realized later that the people I sided with in the racial controversy probably wouldn’t have been thrilled by I wrote. Those kinds of ironies and connections that happen out of nowhere are what make true dialogue much more worthwhile than the stilted smiling at each other that characterizes diversity worship.

—Jorge Sierra, ’04