With the recent events over the past couple of weeks on our campus, a plethora of issues and concerns have been raised. Many valid questions about the relationships between the different communities within the student body, the initial failure of the university to create an effective plan that would protect its students from physical or emotional harm, the overreach of local law enforcement, the purpose of the forum, and many more were brought to the forefront of our attention. While some of these questions were heard and acted upon, a common criticism that I’ve come upon from some of my fellow students and even some faculty members is why did the anti-protesters even choose to engage the protesters? Why didn’t the anti-protesters simply ignore the “ministry”? Why did the anti protesters give them any attention? If we want to be frank, these questions are really asking, “Why did you not just become a passive bystander?”
I want to preface this discourse by stating that the words and actions of Brother Jed is not protected under the first amendment. Calling individual students, who are minding their business, “whores,” “sluts” and whatever other slurs is sexual harassment. If anyone in a classroom setting, workplace, bus or train felt that someone was sexually harassing them, that person would have the right and the means to bring some accountability to the situation. Instead what certain students, myself included, saw in this situation was a group of predators being protected by a whole system. This system includes the law enforcement, administration and all other provisional institutions which essentially gave this group a platform to sexually harass the DePauw community.
Then there are those that say, “It’s just words. These kinds of people are always at larger schools or in the city and we walk right by them all the time.” What this criticism fails to acknowledge is that IU, urban areas and other larger areas don’t have as tight knit a community as DePauw, or even Greencastle as a whole. From my personal experiences, these people were usually walked right by like idiots because there were literally thousands of people trying to get somewhere in a “New York Minute.” The words spoken on a city corner doesn’t carry the same weight as it would on the corner of Hanna and Locust where you may very well be able to run into the whole student body in an hour’s time.
It’s understandable that some may not have it in them to confront these situations head on. You have every right to be passive and act like there’s nothing outside of the usual occurring on your own campus. While you are allowed to simply dismiss this event as an aberration, for many others, this was a physical manifestation of at least part of their DePauw experience. While you are able to run away from this reality, others are forced to live this reality throughout their daily lives. The confrontation of the protesters and its aftermath, in actuality, has very little to do with Brother Jed or his failure of a TV show, which wasn’t brought to anyone’s attention until the initial confrontation. It has everything to do with the voices of the unheard continuously being forced to stay unheard.
Seeing that the Green Dot initiative was being plastered all over campus right before these events, I want to ask all of my fellow peers: what good is the Green Dot initiative if you’re only supposed to apply it in a party setting? Does it stop applying once you step out of a frat? Are we only supposed to take action when it involves sexual misconduct? If outsiders of the DePauw community are allowed to sexually harass our peers on the basis of First Amendment rights, why should we hold ourselves accountable? These are questions that you should hold in mind whenever you try to convince someone to be passive in a situation that’s obviously detrimental to the physical and psychological well being of your peers.
Sylla is a sophomore intended computer science major from Bronx, New York.