“On Moral Reticence” In Thy light shall we see light. In lumine Tuo videbimus lumen.
Excellence.
Our faculty is the best in the world, with more Nobel Laureate professors than any other university. Our dorms have been populated by presidents, rock stars, and literary geniuses. Our facilities are state-of-the-art. Our campus is immaculate. Our students are smarter, superior. Our university is, by definition, an excellent place.
Or so it seems.
Or so The University would have you believe.
The University brands itself as an academy, a lyceum, where students are never asked to accept any concept or belief blindly, but rather to constantly critique the ideas of others and to create our own definitions of morality and excellence, not unlike the philosophical schools Aristotle and Plato founded. This education is meant to teach students how to not only attain academic excellence, but excellence of character, and thus the skills to become great leaders.
The Core is meant to be the vehicle by which students practice creating their own [metaphorical] manifestos delineating their beliefs, not unlike Montaigne does when writing about cannibalism and his thoughts concerning cultural relativism in his essay “On Cannibalism”. Unsurprisingly, The Core is one of the largest selling points for The University. Day in and day out, students sit in classes of under thirty people, where they are challenged by their professors and their fellow students to support their arguments, to explain why they think the things that they do. They are never allowed to assert themselves without the ever-necessary evidence. They are told by professors that it is their responsibility to glean what they can from the works, their responsibility to “mold themselves into better human beings”, as one Literature Humanities professor explained it.
While the idea seems simple at first, this same professor failed to give any specific evidence, when prompted, as to how reading a set list of very, very, antiquated books would automatically gift a person mores, which leads to the main problem concerning The Core, and by extension, The University, This University, Our University, and Every University, when dealing with actual moral crises: morals exist inside the classroom, but very rarely outside of it. When lofty, academic conceptions of morality float around in our ivory towers paired with University pamphlets’ vague promises of sculpting little Johnny into “a better human being” (the only thing he has to do is read the entirety of the Western canon, it’s really that simple!), morality becomes useful and convenient for The University, especially to sell seats (and applications to win seats) to these supposedly revelatory classroom debates. However, when our students have been physically and emotionally wronged in real time, protecting these students and acting morally (also known as “doing the right thing” colloquially, in average laymen speak) become inconvenient actions for The University to take.
Yet the bifurcation between classroom and non-classroom conceptions of morality is not as simple as it has been described here. The scary fact is that The University takes its classroom conception of morality and applies it to cases outside of the classroom, to real life. We are responsible in class for creating our own idea of morality, our own character. Therefore, in the eyes of The University, after completing The Core, each student magically transforms into a fully formed moral being, one who does not rape and who does not get raped, not unlike Daphne transforms into a tree to escape being raped by Apollo in Book I of Ovid’s “Metamorphosis”. (See? People don’t get raped until they really want to be, right? If Daphne could escape her rape, so can you!)
There is just one problem with this assumption.
If we, as 19-year-old ingénues, can be held responsible for the monumental task of building our own character, then how can The University deny their responsibility to do the same?
Prospective students and the world at large are sold the image of Ivy League excellence when they set foot on our campus. They see the perfectly green lawn when they walk past Butler Library, but they don’t realize that the grass is only immaculate because students are not permitted to sit on it for six months out of the year. Tour groups begin their tours in Columbia’s famed Low Library, but they do not know that it will be one of the few times they will ever be allowed inside Low Library as undergraduates (unless, of course, they pay to take part in conferences and summits that occur there or if they become tour guides themselves). These innocent outsiders are told that our students are the best, the brightest, in the entirety of the world, and that by extension, The University is the best, the brightest, in the entirety of the world. But they aren’t told that [some of] the students may have the same moral failings as [some of the] other students at other universities, that having higher test scores does not automatically make a person less of an amoral asshole, and that many of these students will commit crimes and will walk away unscathed by The University.
Most importantly, The University does not want you to know that it is a business, a business that is in the business of working for itself, and only itself. In the battle between What Is Good for The Students and What Is Good for The University, The University will always win, even if the two outcomes are not mutually exclusive. It always has; it always will.
A girl has been raped, and she has been ignored. Many have been raped, and many have been ignored. Many more will be raped, and they too will be ignored. The University’s refusal to accept that we may have a rape problem is just another manifestation of its refusal to accept that we may have any problems. It is a refusal to accept that [some of] our students might just be as base, as amoral, as normal, as [some of] the students at any other university, despite the green grass, despite the fanciness of our Core, despite the [arbitrary] evidence that The University gives to prove our students’ “excellence”: academic recommendations, SAT and AP scores, extraordinary extracurricular activities. Perhaps our students aren’t superior, and by extension, The University itself is not superior. Perhaps The University is not as excellent as it would have itself (or you) believe. Perhaps we, as human beings, are not as excellent as we would like to believe. Perhaps rape does happen here. It’s a terrifying thought, isn’t it?