I do not attend DePauw, and I reckon that I ought to come clean about that upfront. I am a student at Goshen College in northern Indiana, and I happen to be good friends with a number of students at your institution. Through some of these students, I was drawn to the editorial that you recently published, about not wanting to publish vindictive editorials, and looking to represent “both sides” fairly. To this, I would have two things to say: First, our university is currently going through a lot of these same difficulties-- I happen to be on our college’s Senate, and improving race relations on campus is currently our top priority. The controversy on this campus is deep-- there are, of course, many white people who feel persecuted by this conversation on the one end, and on the other end...
You made a number of comments in your article about “the DePauw bubble--” if you’d like to try to get out of that a little bit, there are a lot of individuals on our campus that would love to have a cross-campus dialogue about this. This could be productive for both of our campuses, and could take a lot of forms-- we could publish opinion pieces in each others’ papers, concretely, or we could work with your student government or... We’re pretty flexible. The other thing that I want to address, though, is your position of the importance of representing “both sides” and maintaining editorial objectivity. We actually just had a big discussion with our campus paper over some very similar issues. We were trying to convince students of colour to publish articles about their experience, and our paper (“The Record”) felt that this was pushing an agenda rather than “objectively portraying our campus.” After a few weeks of talks, what we arrived at was an agreement that, yes, we were pushing too hard in some ways, but also that, actually, any media outlet, including a campus paper, is necessarily political in its choices of what to publish and what not to publish. “Objectivity” simply is not attainable. As such, I am a little concerned, because we have also had problems on our campus with people legitimizing racism by trying to portray “both sides.” I think that it is very important to remember that just because there is more than one side does not mean that each side has equal legitimacy, and portraying them both with equal space implies that, which is, again, a political statement (e.g., that racism is just as valid a position to hold as “political correctness.” ) I simply say this because I was concerneed with where that might lead and, from what I hear from my friends, DePauw is a campus with enough of a problem with white privilege already, and I would not want them to have to persist on a campus that cannot condemn racism.
Thank you for your time,
Peter Meyer Reimer