Once upon a time I walked by some water sprayed onto the side of a building on my campus, which happened to be in the shape of a penis. I rolled my eyes and walked away without giving those who created this image a second thought. However, when I logged into Facebook I found a picture of that watery symbol had been posted to the student's page of my school. What ensued can only be described as an embittered battle with students deeply entrenched on both sides. Pro phallic-freedom arguments were fired onto the screen only to be immediately countered with decrees that the watery representation was meant to cause a deeper offense, as opposed to simply being an immature joke. At the end of the day only a ravaged digital battlefield was left behind, with polarized opposition on either side.
Apparently, student climates such as the one at my school are not uncommon. At this point there is almost a formula to these incidents. A student, guest speaker, performer, or professor will say or do something that in most cases was not meant to offend anybody. Most people will shrug it off, but a few will publicize the event online, which then creates a snowball effect that serves to pit the student body against itself. Those that call out the offensive behavior tend to call these incidents microaggressions, which are small acts that supposedly are done with cruel intent.
Just like with anything else each incident has its own degree of seriousness. For instance, in 2013 one student at the University of Texas at Austin was the target of racial slurs, as well as given balloons that were allegedly filled with bleach. More recently at the University of Missouri there have been reports of death threats against black students after racist campus incidents that lead to the resignation of the University's top administrators. These events show the worst side of human nature, so they should not by any means be ignored. In fact, events like these are what student populations who want to make a change should put their effort towards. Instead of escalating minor problems like penis doodles, these groups should challenge the truly harmful incidents in a peaceful manner. Otherwise it simply becomes a retelling of "The Boy Who Cried Wolf" when a truly offensive incident does happen. After all, there is a point at which we must question whether being offended will do more harm than good.
My main concern with this culture of aggression is that it leads to a culture of tearing each other down as students rather than working together to fix the broken status quo. Logical fallacies are thrown left and right until people on both sides forget what they are fighting about in the first place. Moreover, fights such as these can lead to students judging someone's entire character based on one thing they may say during an argument. It provides a path for those students to righteously defend a position and paint the whole situation in black and white. They act like they're the good guys and the other students are the bad guys without truly listening to the counterarguments. Beyond this, many times these crusaders are attacking a small symptom rather than the greater issues at the root of the problem as a whole. What happens is that these situations become more like cyber street fights rather than championing a cause for the greater good, as they are intended.
Once this atmosphere is created it can also have an adverse impact on the classroom setting. Students become afraid to speak up in class, for fear that they may be persecuted. It also leads to an increase in anxiety in students since it makes them feel constantly paranoid that what they say will somehow be hurtful to another person. They then feel as though they might get emotionally attacked for their words. Having to constantly second guess what he/she is going to say before he/she says it leads to a great internal tension that makes interacting with other people a frightening experience.
Apart from students, professors on these campuses are also being affected. The goal of college should be to expand one's mind, which can't be done if a huge list of topics have caution tape put around them. Recently in Vox, Edward Schlosser published an article entitled, "I'm a liberal professor, and my liberal students terrify me." The mere fact that a professor felt compelled to write an article such as that is an illustration of just how stifling the current atmosphere at many liberal-arts colleges currently is. In the article he states that, "I once saw an adjunct not get his contract renewed after students complained that he exposed them to 'offensive' texts written by Edward Said and Mark Twain." Teachers should be rewarded rather than fired for exposing students to both mentally and emotionally challenging material. The only way to make a change in the world is to pop your own safety bubble, otherwise nobody will be able to hear you shout blindly inside of it.
Instead of a culture of aggression, we should try to build a culture free of viciousness. The old and worn out "eye for an eye" mantra applies here. People are in the wrong on both sides of these arguments, but the increasingly polarized atmosphere will prove to be destructive in the end. It is important for those that get offended easily to remove themselves from the situation to question whether what they see at face value truly delivers deep emotional pain. On the other hand, those that scoff at the acts of microaggression shouldn't attack those that are offended. Otherwise this will lead to personal attacks of character, instead of a discussion about the problem topic itself. Both sides need to open their minds and realize that aggression of any kind is never going to lead to understanding.
Everybody on this planet should have the right to be offended and to express their views The conundrum is that if someone expresses their opinions there will always be somebody else in this world that is offended by those ideas. Therefore, the answer is not censorship. The answer is not self-righteously deciding what other people can and cannot say. The answer is for everyone to open up their ears instead of trying to be the person who shouts the loudest. Otherwise, all we end up with is a deaf society.
Conor Ryan is a student at Soka University of America who also runs the blog Interviewtion.
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