On Vanderbilt University’s campus in November 2015, a bag of fecal matter was discovered on the porch of the University’s Black Cultural Center. As might be expected, the incident garnered widespread attention on campus, and outrage immediately ensued. The discovery of the bagged feces came the day after a group of black students staged a public protest against alleged racism on campus. Naturally, the optics of an incident like this are less than ideal; the placement of feces on the doorstep of a University’s Black Cultural Center only a day after a major protest might have certain implications and play into particular narratives. Vanderbilt’s black student organization didn’t hesitate to denounce the incident as a “deplorable” act of hate: without delay, the group condemned the episode on its Facebook page, contacted police, and informed campus administrators of what it saw to be a “vile” act “of hurt.” Within hours of the student group’s allegations, however, law enforcement officials revealed that the bag was left on the porch not as an act of racism or bias, but by a blind student who had just picked up after her service dog and hoped someone at the Center would properly dispose of the bag on her behalf.
In recent weeks and months, the Holy Cross community has been practically bombarded with allegations, assumptions, and assertions that echo the false cries of bias and racism from Vanderbilt’s campus several years ago. Students and other members of the campus community have received a plethora of frantic emails, walked past constantly expanding arrays of condemnatory posters and signs, and attended narrative-driven on-campus events that paint Holy Cross as a nasty community festered with hate, plagued by intolerance, and beleaguered with bigotry.
““...The administration should practice what it preaches and aim to seek the truth rather than to impose a narrative.”
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The Holy Cross administration’s tendency to leap to particular conclusions about rumors and allegations on campus has become entirely predictable. Rather than withholding judgment about reported incidents until additional facts are available and investigations are completed, the school chooses to immediately default to the “hate crime” label. This pattern has led to immeasurable harm within the Holy Cross community: the administration’s habitual rush-to-judgment approach when handling ambiguous incidents has cultivated an atmosphere of hypersensitivity on campus. How can Holy Cross in good faith call for students to “be patient with ambiguity and uncertainty,” as it does in its mission statement, when the school itself refuses to be? Instead of force-feeding students with unsubstantiated narratives of racism, sexism, homophobia, and bigotry every time vague incidents are reported, the administration should practice what it preaches and aim to seek the truth rather than to impose a narrative.
Like the occurrence at Vanderbilt in 2015, many of the incidents to which the Holy Cross administration has responded appear nefarious on a surface level. When students are informed of torn-down black history signs and missing rainbow flags, it’s not entirely unreasonable to assume that such acts are bias-motivated or otherwise wicked in intent. But the automatic presumption that these acts are ‘hate crimes’ is preposterous and unfair. On more than one occasion during my rather short time at Holy Cross, students have drunkenly torn down signs in residence halls. Is it that far-fetched to think that the removal of the “Black Herstory” board in February could have been the result of drunken recklessness rather than an instance of “bias-motivated vandalism” and an “act of intolerance”? Is it that far-fetched to think that the disappearance of a rainbow flag last November could have been caused by the wind? According to Holy Cross, apparently. In both of these instances, the administration explicitly noted that investigations had not been completed. In the case of the rainbow flag, students were informed that school officials “do not know the motivation for the flag’s removal,” yet they still didn’t hesitate to label the incident as “deeply troubling.”
Of course, it’s not infeasible that some of these incidents have been bias-motivated. And in cases where bias is proven and verified, such incidents should be condemned in the strongest possible terms. But the constant presumption of bias in cases where no such bias is evident makes the Holy Cross administration look reactive, hypersensitive, and possibly motivated by a victimhood narrative. As Professor David Schaefer of Political Science wrote in a previous issue of The Fenwick Review in response to the appearance of a swastika on campus, “Judging from my long acquaintance with Holy Cross students, I would guess that the swastika was far more likely a stupid prank provoked by the College's ever-increasing barrage of ‘multicultural’ indoctrination than a reflection of Nazi sentiment.” In a sense, the College’s ultra-reactive responses to incidents like the torn-down black history sign, the missing rainbow flag, and other allegations with zero evidence are comical. How can one make such jarring assumptions based on such little information? How can the administration justifiably cancel a day of classes and force a summit on “campus culture” when over 100 hours of security footage and more than 40 interviews produced not even an iota of evidence for the supposed “hate crime” the summit was intended to address? How does jumping to unsubstantiated conclusions and advancing uncorroborated narratives of hate in any way benefit students or the greater campus community?
Several national incidents have invoked this same sense of false outrage in the first two months of 2019 alone. The alleged bias-motivated attack against actor Jussie Smollett, which several prominent politicians did not hesitate to label as “an attempted modern day lynching” and a “racist, homophobic attack,” turned out to be part of a not-so-elaborate hoax staged for the advancement of Smollett’s own career. Ironically, it wasn’t until after the alleged Jussie Smollett attack was revealed as a hoax that Democrat presidential candidate Senator Kamala Harris said she wasn’t “going to comment until I know the outcome of the investigation” and Senator Cory Booker, another 2020 candidate, vowed to “withhold until all the information actually comes out from on-the-record sources.” If the “outcome of the investigation” and “all the information” are important, why weren’t they when each senator immediately decried the attack as a “modern day lynching”? Likewise, students from Covington Catholic High School were instantly characterized as racist and bigoted based on a few seconds of video footage depicting a confrontation with a Native American elder, until it was revealed based on extended footage that the elder was provoking the students, not the other way around. What do incidents such as these say about the state of the culture? Perhaps more importantly, what can we learn from them?
We live in a reactive society. Whether our nation’s current level of hypersensitivity is rooted in animosity towards the President, towards people of faith, towards ‘straight white men,’ or towards anything or anyone else, people tend to jump to conclusions based on what they want to believe. In reality, narratives of racism don’t hold any water when evidence for such racism ceases to exist. America in 2019 is a pretty great place to exist: very few are truly victims, and all people – including women and minorities – have more opportunities now than at any other time in history. Likewise, whether we like to admit so or not, Holy Cross is an extremely inclusive and welcoming campus. Everyone who is fortunate enough to attend this school is far from being victimized, regardless of what the powers at be might want us to think.
Ultimately, everyone on campus would be better off if the administration were to take a step back, examine all available information, and let any investigations run their course before sending campus-wide emails decrying unclear incidents as “hate crimes” the second they’re reported. Do we want to be a campus based on narrative or a campus based on fact? Do we want to assume the worst in one another or the best in one another? Do we want to be a campus that jumps to conclusions or a campus that strives to reach the truth? I can only hope we aim for the latter. Our campus, our community, and our culture will be better for it.
““Ultimately, everyone on campus would be better off if the administration were to take a step back, examine all available information, and let any investigations run their course before sending campus-wide emails decrying unclear incidents as ‘hate crimes’ the second they’re reported.”
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