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Georgetown's deplorable climate for discourse
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So as not to make the same mistake of so many other apocalyptic soothsayers (think Glenn Beck of this year or Keith Olbermann of a few years back), I will not predict that Georgetown is on the fast track to permanent irrelevance. In fact, we have our successes, and for those we are appropriately proud. What I would encourage, however, is that we are all appropriately ashamed of ourselves for students’ responses to the Vox Populi article concerning the Georgetown student seeking a personal assistant. The responses were petty, sophomoric, and occasionally morbid. It’s shameful enough that a Hoya thinks himself so busy as to require a personal assistant (and I would consider the same criticism valid for students who rely on Soapy Joe’s), but it’s cause for much greater collective embarrassment when one considers the derision directed his way.
A perfunctory perusal of the student responses on the Vox Populi blog would reveal that the student body harbors an unnatural fascination with feces, phalli, and menstruation, and their comparison to figures whom the students view unfavorably. One student seemed so offended as to wish that the prospective employer would find himself struck by a bus. (One can understand the populist sentiment that desires the foolish rich to suffer harm, but how can one also wish the embroiling legal action that the offending bus driver will surely suffer?) Others went so far as to suggest that the advertiser’s interest in finance betrays a desire to pay all his future employees the paltry sum of $10 per hour.
Though such remarks may have been made in good fun, they reveal something internally corrosive in our campus character. Consider what kind of cynicism it requires one commenter to say “The people defending Cooper must be disgustingly pampered themselves or (most likely) they are actually one Mr. Cooper, trying to defend himself through multiple anonymous postings. Hey Cooper.” Another commenter used it as an opportunity to deploy some Marxist sarcasm, saying “i keep slaves in my backyard, but i paid good $$$ for them, so it’s okay. it’s just capitalism.” These are not the attitudes of thoughtful, worldly, charitable people. These remarks are inconsiderate, parochial, and selfish. Furthermore, they are wholly unsuitable in a university setting. One imagines the horrified responses these remarks would elicit from the admissions board, had they been submitted in the students’ application packet.
Even as this university is plagued by a sense of entitlement among its richer elements (as it is asserted the advertisement evidences), there also seems to prevail an equally unfounded resentment of those elements. Disdain, regardless of the class to which it is directed, is unjustifiable at our university. If we continue to indulge this instinct to deride the foolish rich, or conversely, to mock the uncouth commoners, we do grave harm to our community. Note the prefix uni in “university.” We are one body, not be divided along class lines or by political sensibilities. Within this university is a varied student body that univocally asserts, “We are Georgetown.” That, above all, is most important.
Though I cite as example the miserable treatment that the advertiser has suffered, a quick glance at the blog responses to other articles on the Vox Populi and The Hoya websites reveals that this thoughtless censure is more than just occasional. Undoubtedly, the security provided by internet anonymity emboldens bloggers, but such cowardice simply shows how shameful the posts truly are; were any of the bloggers proud of his work, he surely would have affixed his true name to it. So long as we continue to lambaste so savagely those students whose behaviors offend, we miss the opportunity to hold meaningful discussions about these matters. More devastatingly, however, we create a climate of mistrust and resentment in which no student can flourish.
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