The guest column “Dickinson, Stop Coddling Myths of On-Campus Oppression” echoes an unfortunate sentiment many in mass media are espousing toward college protest movements nationally, and it warrants a response.  Just as many of our greatest thinkers have offered that the United States has shifted from its idealistic values toward becoming a republic to an empire, many have also suggested that our attitudes toward higher education have shifted from education, specifically the liberal arts, as an ideal space for forming human values to a mere playground for would-be pragmatists and bureaucrats to acquire credentials.

While journalists and pundits, desperate for attention predictably attack education, it’s troubling when people with (or pursuing) liberal arts degrees disavow its most sacred values. Many students who enter Dickinson have undoubtedly experienced prejudice and discrimination prior to their arrival. But, rightfully they arrive assuming that people at such an institution are civil, humane and thoughtful in their social interactions. In other words, college is understood as a genuine respite from an increasingly coarse society. This is not naïve, it is inspiring.

The schism students experience, from being assaulted with hateful slurs, to being misgendered, to being treated like social experiments, to being blatantly excluded socially and the like, have led our students to challenge the nature of our student culture. This is important because it shows students are thinking critically. The cafeteria demonstration, the subsequent meeting in ATS, plus prior endeavors like the Dialogue to Actions and safe space campus designations are all evidence of this.

Each points to an enlightened perspective that we are capable of civil cross-cultural engagement. The strategies employed above extend long-standing strategies to combat social challenges that have haunted the nation for centuries, and many other colleges and universities for decades. Turning a deaf ear to the outcries of students, and dismissing their voices as juvenile petulance is both reactive and antithetical to liberal arts values. For those members downplaying these movements because wanting an inclusive society is “unrealistic” and responding to oppression is “PC” and wanting a better world is “impossible”: college is a real world that attracts thousands of people annually and shapes their values, which in turn impacts the greater society. What better opportunity exists to gain and develop the tools to reimagine the world, rather than accept it as it is?

Understanding that a liberal arts college has a particular mission predicated on helping students develop a moral and ethical awareness intrinsic to their ability to contribute as citizens, we must ask ourselves:  How can students, in good conscience, pursue these educational values in pursuit of higher knowledge only to reject the test of these values when it becomes inconvenient and requires self-examination? To do so is to counter the forms of reflection and empathy essential to the liberal arts.

Over the last few decades, educators have had to combat an increasingly anti-intellectual society hostile to true introspection. We must resist the temptation to succumb to the intellectually lazy premise that it is a foregone conclusion that acknowledging oppressions and aiming for inclusion are somehow “counterproductive” and less possible because such concerns are “not the way the world works.” We have the keys to the car; it’s time we stop creeping backward out of fear, or coasting passively in neutral. Let us actually drive forward, toward something better.