I was not present for the town hall meeting on March 24 in which Students for Change addressed President Harvey Stenger with a list of demands. That said, I don’t wish to address the meeting, rather the demands of Students for Change in general. Specifically, I would like to respond to the article I read recently by Daniel Milyavsky, “Students for Change demands are unfounded.”
One of the demands that seems to be causing concern among students on campus is the call for severe sanctioning for those caught using “offensive or subjective language” toward individuals or groups based on but not limited to race, sexual orientation, gender and political affiliation.
Milyavsky declares this a violation of the First Amendment, comparing it to a situation in which criticizing socialism in an intellectual manner would result in school sanctions. This is absurd and misleading. Of course students will not be hauled off to the courts for having such a discussion. I cannot imagine that Students for Change wishes to expel all discussion of race, gender, religion, politics and so forth; all of which can be discussed in an educational, and even critical, manner if done appropriately, especially in the classroom. However, I would hardly say that the blatantly racist, and at times violent, Yik Yak posts by Binghamton students qualify as such conversations.
The author and anyone with similar concerns are severely oversimplifying the Constitution. Amendments are not to be interpreted in a strictly literal way. Certain types of speech are not protected by the Constitution, such as the use of obscenity, hate speech and incitement of violence, and therefore have no overriding reason to be protected by the school.
Milyavsky was also highly critical of the group’s demand to diversify faculty as well as the student body, expressing concerns that Affirmative Action hiring policies would lower the competency of professors as well as stating that students of color can simply apply to schools other than Binghamton.
This demonstrates a real lack of understanding of Affirmative Action. I’ve heard the argument before that people should be hired without account for their race, and that doing anything otherwise would violate our notions of “equality” and “fairness.” But Affirmative Action policies are not taking away from either of these things in our society; rather, it’s an attempt to make up for the lack of equality and fairness.
To judge whether or not something is fair, we have to look at the translation of relevant resources. The relevant resources for being hired or accepted to a university are similar in that they are both based on a candidate’s intellectual abilities. To say that the relevant resources were being translated fairly would require that the demographics of an institution be more or less proportional to the given area from which candidates were selected. If as a society, we can actually say we believe in equality, that no race is intellectually superior to another, how can we explain the fact that, according to College Data, African-American and Hispanic students only make up 16.4 percent of the student body? The demographics don’t add up.
Lastly, the author criticized the group’s demand for cultural competency courses as GenEd requirements. Ironically, the author’s quick dismissal of any Affirmative Action policies makes me all the more convinced that such courses would be a good idea in that they could provide students with information about what such policies entail, and why they are necessary. And what could possibly be the harm of introducing cultural competency courses? I’ve had to sit through a number of GenEds that not only did not pertain to my major, but didn’t even really pertain to anything in my life (the weather course/lab I took my freshman year is coming to mind), so why is it preposterous to think that we should take a course that trains us to appropriately respond to certain racial and cultural issues? As they are, the demands of Students for Change are not unreasonable and certainly are falsely represented by the overgeneralized and hysterical rhetoric present in Milyavsky’s article.