PHOTO COURTESY OF HUARUI (CERRY) ZHANG ’22/HAMILTON COLLEGE
Last year, in the wake of the first Town Hall, I wrote a piece in
The Spectator
that was quite contentious. I took issue with certain statements that students made that I found to be objectively wrong. I attended the Town Hall on Monday, Apr. 29 with an impending aura of dread, as I expected a similar scene from the year prior. I was unequivocally wrong. The statements made by the student body were, for the most part, constructive and demonstrated real passion and commitment to the issues discussed.
These statements were markedly different than the ones expressed at the rally on Friday, Apr. 19 outside Buttrick Hall. I’ve learned my lesson from last year and won’t bludgeon you with facts. I do, however, think that the rally and the general engagement of the student body as whole presents several pervasive problems that impede the institutional change students are calling for.
The first and most serious issue that I see is the misinformation that is propagated and becomes accepted as “truth.” When ideas that are believed to be truisms by students are disputed by the Dean of Students Office, the Counseling Center, or Campus Safety, the seeds of divisiveness, anger, and conflict are sown. It is our responsibility as students of Hamilton College to take the time to make sure we are educated on the matters with which we are engaging. It doesn’t matter if it is the resources the Counseling Center has, the history of Tsarist Russia, or a specific neural network: it is our duty to make sure that we know what we’re talking about before we speak. This is even more true when it comes to sensitive issues such as sexual assault, mental health, diversity programs, and social spaces on the College’s campus.
I realize that as students on the Hill we receive a large amount of emails daily. I understand that it may not always be convenient to read every Student Assembly minutes and that it can be intimidating to sit down with an administrator and get some clarification. I get that — I truly do. The old and cliché adage says “nothing easy is worth doing.” But often I find myself repeating the same four or five statements vis-à-vis mental health on campus.
None of what I’m saying is new. The information is out there, you just need to be willing to seek it out. I don’t believe that we should expect to be spoon fed information. We live on a college campus where the internet speed is roughly 90–95 megabits per second and there is an abundance of computers. Not knowing something shouldn’t be an excuse.
The mindset of “Well I didn’t know that, so I can’t be at fault for being wrong” may be supported in the zeitgeist of the College, but think of how fragile this veneer is in the real world. Imagine telling an IRS auditor, “Oh, I didn’t realize that I had to fill out that portion of my W-2, but it isn’t my fault because no one told me I had to.”
We are adults. It is our responsibility to become informed and to speak from places of knowledge. This is not to say that you need to be an expert on an issue to engage with a subject. All I’m saying is that before you make a “factual” claim, take the time to make sure it is actually a fact rather than an accepted opinion by students that somehow becomes “truth.”
One perfect example of this is the widely-held belief, as indexed by statements students made at and in the wake of the rally on Friday, that the Hamilton College Administration (specifically the Dean of Students Office) was hosting the Town Hall and that they had decided that they only were going to cover two topics. Anyone who’d paid attention to the signs around campus or read the Student Assembly Minutes would know that this event was going to be hosted by SA.
Furthermore, SA decided to limit the number of topics to two (though eventually it was expanded to four.) This decision was made because last year there were 5–6 topics that did not get equal time and the student body expressed frustration that the topics weren’t addressed equally.
The second problem that I will identify in this article is even more pervasive than the first and just as, if not more, damaging. I am concerned with the disparity between the noise around mental health and sexual assault versus actual engagement and action. There is a time and place for large scale conversation and discourse. I am in no way disparaging these conversations.
However, I am disheartened by the lack of transition between conversation and action. It becomes even more of an issue for me when the origin of the conversation is a fundamentally inaccurate one. If students were actively engaging in conversation with administrators and working on the task forces, student groups, and organizations that are dedicated to bringing about actual change, we would have a different campus. I truly believe that. Not one person that spoke out about the resources the College offers is involved, to my knowledge, with the Mental Wellness Collective or any institutionally-backed mental health advocacy group.
If we as a campus claim to care deeply about policies that the College has surrounding mental health, sexual assault, and other pressing issues but refuse to take part in the actual hard work of finding solutions, then what does that say about us? Perhaps it says that we are more interested in looking as if we are engaged, socially conscious, and progressive individuals than actually becoming so.
Dean Chase, David Walden, Dean Martinez, and President Wippman are all available in various capacities to meet with you and hear your concerns. They want and need your input. Small-group or individual discussion is the only way that we can being to chip away against a culture of performativity operating without actual engagement.
This article is a plea for action. I recognize that the semester is quickly coming to an end and that there likely be no palpable impact of my diatribe. This being said, it is possible. Maybe my words will stick with you and, if you’re eligible, you’ll return in the fall with a renewed drive to take part in the hard work that other students and administrators are engaged in. We can’t do it alone. We need you.
We need you to join SMART, SAVES, MOHASA, Minds for Change, the Mental Wellness Collective, and other similar groups. We need you to hold yourself and your peers accountable for speaking from an informed position. The College needs you and so do your peers.
