Disregard for opinions reveals student apathy

Ben Reichman Guest Columnist

The apathy of the Vassar College campus astounds me. Perhaps we have chosen to forget that this school was itself founded on a politically transgressive act—Vassar was the first all-women’s school of the Seven Sisters to be officially chartered as a college in 1861.

This means that every radical and revolutionary political idea that we do not take seriously is a strike against our very own foundations.

And yet it seems that the more idealistic and radical an activist group is at Vassar these days, the more it is pushed to the side, ignored and looked down upon. This lack of seriousness concerning radical political ideas is not simply extra-curricular. While all intellectualism is in itself politically transgressive, the strain of academia that I find invading Vassar’s politically radical roots is an academia that insulates itself from the world, cloistered in postmodern dissembling, moral relativism and an overwhelming, enervating passionlessness for political change.

Political change is viewed as something un-academic and silly, not worth spending a class discussing.

We at Vassar have become “used to” hearing radicals shouting for things and demanding change—and as a result we have become increasingly efficient at shrugging it off.

Whether it is radical left-wing politics, feminism or environmental activism, a passionate, idealistic commitment to politics has been laughed out of Vassar and called annoying and obnoxious. Political opinions are “just opinions,” in the words of one of my classmates, as though this made them less important.

Opinions are indeed “just opinions,” but it was opinions—coupled with research—that motivated the founders of Vassar to prize the idea of an all-women’s college before such an idea was considered acceptable by mainstream society. Likewise, it was “only opinions” that enabled Vassar to take divisive action and divest its money from forces keeping South African under the rule of apartheid in the 1980s.

The moment we start denying the potency of opinions, we cease to be a truly politically egalitarian institution. It seems like the one thing no one asked themselves in response to the recent and ongoing Kick Coke campaign is, “What if these people are right?” And this is a question that I hear less and less around Vassar College.

Sure, we are all experts at arguing things wrong, poking fallacious holes in the rhetoric that we are all too skilled at identifying. We are well-versed in negative truths—we know that rhyming poems are in all cases infantile and amateurish; that to encounter emotion or sentimentality in fiction is a fate worse than death; that an emotionally vacant veneer of hipster detachment is the epitome of cool; that all things “post”—postmodernism, postpostmoderism, posthumanism—are glorious and intellectually edifying in their recognition of what is wrong.

But what if we have lost the ability to recognize correctness? I fear that in a relativistic age such as this many would say “correctness” doesn’t exist.

But consider for a moment if all of the theories are true: if the United States is actually controlled by a vast, evangelical, monolithic conspiracy of greedy corporations and evangelical Christians, run by old white men who delineate every last facet of our daily lives, and that their racism, xenophobia, patriotism, ignorance, lack of care for human life and self-confidence is huge beyond our imagining and positively Biblical in its scope.

We’ve been taught that ideas like this are foolish—conspiracy theories that aren’t worth the paper they are written on. But why do we jump to such conclusions? Maybe these antagonistic forces have managed to remain so invisible precisely because they’re so omnipresent: It’s the last thing we would think of—as individualistic Americans with a firm belief in our own personal agency—that we are not in control of our lives. But until we band together and embrace the common truths that sustain us and the common antagonists that oppress us, there will be no true progress in any form.

So the next time a politically radical member of the Vassar campus stops you to hand you a pamphlet, ask your opinion or debate an issue like Vassar’s decision to become co-ed, don’t walk away. Take a minute to stop and think about it. Why else are you here?