Alum Alam Sounds off on Assault

To the Editors:

During my senior year, I served as the arts editor for the Oberlin Review and my tenure was not without its scandals, Oberlin being precisely the sort of place to take its arts seriously. I disparaged a fellow student’s dance performance, I was depicted in a comic strip in KKK regalia because I was that politically insensitive –– clearly, there were a handful of people on campus who disagreed with what I had to say. My words elicited letters to the Editor, e-mails of unsolicited thanks or upbraiding but never, thankfully, a beating. That was real discourse. And education is all about discourse, the exchange of ideas, assent and dissent.
It’s sad to see that Oberlin now seems to have lost it, this quality so essential to the unique brand of education offered there. This free exchange, this idyll of academics, was ruined when Oberlin became the school where [senior] Ryan Catignani, [junior] Nicholas Walker, [senior] Richard Kocher and Markeith Reed beat up [senior] Jeff Harvey over the opinions he expressed in the Oberlin Grape. How could Oberlin choose not to punish students who don’t subscribe to the fundamental notion that we all have something of importance to say, or failing that, that simply the act of saying what we have to say, no matter what sort of claptrap it is, is a sacred one? How could these people participate in the institutional exchange of ideas without any basic respect for others? Isn’t it a shame that the old Oberlin way, the expression of passionate ideas, on politics, race, gender, what have you, will be lost forever because of a bunch of thugs prowling the night, ready to dispense with whomever might disagree with them on however trivial a point?
I won’t attempt to defend the column that Harvey published in the Grape, inciting this attack. But I will defend Harvey’s right to express his unsophisticated ideas, as much as I’ll defend the rights of everyone from Eminem to Emmylou Harris to express theirs. And if indeed it’s true that “[Bill] Stackman advised him [Harvey] not to write anything inflammatory” as Sarah Miller-Davenport reports in the Review, then I would purport that in his desire to get the Oberlin PR machinery into full spin mode, Stackman has ommitted a grave error. The fault here lies not with the victim, Mr. Stackman. 
“Obviously, it’s very disturbing to think of a student attacked while asleep in the residence hall room and we will always take a behavior like that very, very seriously,” Peter Goldsmith is quoted as saying in the first Review dispatch on this incident. I can’t help but wonder, though, how much more seriously the College would have taken such behavior had this crime been committed not by tuition-paying students but by some of the locals. The attackers, lest we forget, are facing criminal charges in the City of Oberlin.

I was always a reluctant Oberlin booster, but my degree does instill in me some pride. When I am wealthier, I had planned on giving money to the College, as I had planned on someday advising my younger sister to consider an Oberlin education. It may sound hysterical, but I cannot now in good conscience do either. I hope that President Dye, Mr. Love, Mr. Stackman and Mr. Goldsmith are taking note.
And a final note, to Messrs. Catignani, Walker, Kocher and Reed: I live in the Fort Greene section of Brooklyn –– on South Elliot Place, right between Fulton Street and Hanson Place. It’s #112 –– the building is unmarked for some reason –– but there’s an adorable terra cotta pig on the stoop as our identifying marker. It’s the second floor apartment. I make this point, gentlemen, to demonstrate that you have failed in your primary objective: you cannot intimidate people from expressing opinions that diverge from your own. Until you grasp this simple concept, you won’t really be getting an Oberlin education, or any education worth anything, despite the fact that you’re all students in good standing, at least as far as Oberlin College is concerned.

–Rumaan Alam
OC ’99
Brooklyn, NY