Student Protest at Willamette University

*This and the next essay deal with an incident of disruption in my Jurisprudence class on 11/16/06. The first essay, however, sets the context to understand this disruption.

I currently teach at a law school of a small private university in the Pacific Northwest. The undergraduate campus, across the street from the law school, has about 1,800 students; the law school about 500; the business school about 200; the education graduate program about 150. The school, Willamette, is nestled near downtown of a sleeply capital city (Salem, OR), and also sits across the street from the State Capitol. Willamette has long had ties with the United Methodist Church, which ties are most strongly emphasized when a rich Methodist is in town. Yet, the genial Methodist spirit of tolerance, mutual acceptance and commitment to a fairly liberal political agenda permeates the place. After being around the university for about seven years (as student and professor), I readily confess that it is hard not to have affection for the place.

The people that we love around Willamette are the people that progressives love--as a matter of fact I think we readily embrace, in theory, almost everyone here except sexual predators, fat people and those with a far-right political agenda.* Hate is not a virtue we cultivate, though, truth be told,

[*Just to set the record straight, for anyone who cares, I generally vote Democratic in elections, though demogoguery is not the exclusive possession of either political party.]

we really have little tolerance for those who don't adopt our tolerance message. We love diversity, unless the diversity includes people who don't articulate the diversity or pluralist line.

One of the most recent groups of people to receive the warm embrace of the Willamette community are those of diverse sexual identities and orientations. Most people know that even the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders ("DSM"), the "Bible" of psychologists, characterized homosexuality as a disorder as recently as 25 years ago; now, however, Willamette is on the forefront in supporting those of homosexual orientation or those who might want to explore it. However, we have gone far beyond just affirming homosexuality. If you only said, "I affirm the right of people to express a gay (or lesbian) sexual orientation," and then stopped, you would be whistled down by the progressive sexual police on campus. Why? Because you have to be willing to include yet another group in your statement. The latest group seeking some kind of equal treatment are our transgendered friends. I don't know if I have ever really met one on campus, but you never know. They may be all around us. But I think the number of transgendered Willamette community members probably equals those who come to work in wheel chairs; at least we have parking places for the latter--even though the parking places are often further from the buildings they seek to enter than those for the non-disabled population.

Therefore if you want to be ultra politically correct on the sexual identity front (and I could be out of date, because terminology changes so quickly), you need to affirm lesbians, gays and transgendered persons. Liberal religious people, of whom there are a few at Willamette, talk about the Lesbian, Gay and Transgendered Children of God. We may abbreviate this movement the "LGBT" movement, but watch your initials, or someone may think you are ordering a sandwich that the vegan/vegetarian community might find offensive. One of the things that this movement stands against is "heterosexism," a term which actually was coined, according to the OED, as long ago as 1979. Heterosexism may be defined as a prejudice or antagonism shown by heterosexual persons toward homosexuals.

The Perfect Bubble Bursts

Willamette University, thus, is a comfortable place to work for most of its employees and is a pleasant environment for the majority of its students. The world's stark realities rarely impinge on the quiet campus, and we are all pretty much free to be whatever our inclination leads us to be.

Yet there is some stuff in the air on the undergraduate campus that most of us at the law school didn't know about and that came to a head on Thursday (Nov. 16) when some undergraduate students took over my class early in the morning. Presidential pleading with the leaders of the movement to stop taking over classes led the students to abandon this strategy by 10:30 a.m. on the 16th, though mine was not the only class affected. Why did they do so?

It depends whom you ask. Student discontent was either triggered by two incidents on campus since the end of October or has been brewing for a long time. The two recent incidents were when a few students wore offensive costumes at a "Most Offensive Costume Party Ever" Halloween party--dressed up in blackface or costumed as Adolf Hitler and when a student did an offensive imitation of Dr Dre at a "WU Idol" show recently. Others, however, claim that their complaints about Willamette are long-standing and include the school's lack of commitment to building a diverse community as well as tepid commitment to issues of sexual identity and gender/ethnic studies. Let me stress that these issues seem to be of higher priority to some undergraduate students, though there are those at the law school who also feel that our commitment to diversity isn't as robust as it could be.

Conclusion

I was rather blissfully unaware of these issues when I went into my Jurisprudence class on Thursday November 16 at 8:30 a.m. The next essay describes what happened.

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