Off Topic, On Point | Mr. Vassar prompts examination of group decisions

Evan Casper-Futterman Columnist

A friend of mine recently sent out an e-mail in which she expressed her desire to be nominated for Mr. Vassar. Ultimately, it seems she didn’t get enough votes, and her candidacy ended before it really began. Yet this abortive candidacy should be examined, because a female will sometime soon gain enough votes, and the Senior Class Council at that time will have a decision to make. But their decision will be a representation—a microcosm—of the state of mind of the Vassar campus at the time.

I begin with a deceptively simple premise: Mr. Vassar should be open to any Vassar student regardless of biology or socially-constructed-gender-spectrum identification. I say “deceptively” because when I first received my friend’s e-mail, my immediate reaction was dismissive: I thought she was testing a boundary that didn’t need to be tested, picking a fight where one didn’t need to be picked.

Yet by some stroke of luck, I had a realization after about 10 minutes that I was the one being unreasonable. But I worry that what is possible at the level of the individual—the ability to change one’s mind with relative ease—is lost when translated to the level of the group.

The key to this eventual situation lies in this difference between individual and group psychology. At Vassar, there is a prevailing self-perception that “we” are a collective of intelligent, responsible, liberal-minded, tolerant young individuals, and therefore our actions at a group level necessarily reflect this thoughtfulness and integrity. Yet this assumption may actually do harm to our ability to behave in a consistently progressive and thoughtful manner. It might prevent the Council from admitting a female contestant, for example.

If the Council chooses not to admit a female contestant, paradoxically, this in fact says little about the individuals that comprise the Council. They would be making their decision the same way I did: by reacting to an unexpected and unsanctioned proposal with the reasonable but unmeditated response of “no, not now.” Yet my ability as an individual to change my mind afforded me a luxury that the Council members would not have. Once a decision in a group is reached, it is far more difficult for individuals within the group to counter the prevailing currents of opinion. The Council members are intelligent, forward-thinking individuals who, if confronted with the decision on a personal level, would likely side with change, but because they are placed into a collective, as a group, they feel absolved of any personal ethical necessity and are thus more likely to choose the path of the status quo. It is this dynamic that led the philosopher and theologian Reinhold Niebuhr to comment that groups tend to be more immoral than individuals.

This difference between the dynamics of individuals and groups is fascinating, and has important implications for how we think and act as on our own and as members of a larger entity, such as a college or nation. In his Letter from Birmingham Jail, Martin Luther King Jr. responded to a group of fellow clergymen who told him that they believed his civil rights program of nonviolent direct action was “unwise and untimely,” though they assured him individually that they ultimately supported his goal of integration. Yet this position of moderation, argued King, favors the semblance of an “order,” free of tension, over the presence of a more just situation.

I raise the analogy of the civil rights movement not to imply any moral parity with the Mr. Vassar pageant or to cast my friend into the role of Dr. King, but rather to demonstrate the parallels between two situations in which sympathetic individuals fail to act to remedy a situation that is in their power to improve.

We still don’t know whether all Vassar students can compete for the title of Mr. Vassar. This remains an exercise in the realm of the hypothetical. But when the day comes, as we should all know that it will, it would be best for the Class of ’08 and beyond to ponder the lessons of history and not err on the side of caution.