My Letter to the Editor

Vandalism on our Panel on the Washington Avenue Bridge:

My Letter to the Editor of the Minnesota Daily:

Our Tolerance of Intolerance
Our campus prides itself on the claim that we are a community of diversity and tolerance, embracing various backgrounds and perspectives and encouraging students to express themselves in a manner that promotes and protects this environment of acceptance. When I came to the U, I imagined in my naivety, a place where all of these perspectives and viewpoints could converge in an open intellectual forum, fostering this universally beneficial and education exchange of ideas. Unfortunately, what I came to realize was that the "tolerance" here excludes certain groups and ideologies from its graces.

An example of how we fall short of these ideals was provided recently through an act of vandalism on the Washington Avenue Bridge. Someone wrote "Get a clue" on the College Republicans' panel. Now, whether or not you agree with conservative or libertarian viewpoints, acts like this are unacceptable. Such expressions enforce the mindset that there is only one correct ideology and that anyonw who sees things differently is clueless or misinformed. And, as such, this also constitutes a blatant disregard for our efforts as a community to foster an environment of tolerance and respect. Republican students have as much a right to believe as they do and just as many reasons for doing so. And to be truly tolerant, we must be able to respect not just those who agree with us, but those who disagree with us. Yes, this would appear to be a commensense defintion, but since we are still dealing with frequent acts of hypocritical intolerance, it was apparently still worth iterating. I'd like to see us as a campus actually live up to the standards that we so proudly claim to meet in our orientations and college pamphlets and to express ourselves in a manner befit such a community. Students should not be alienated and disrespected on campus-in classrooms, clubs, social settings, and volunteer events-due to their ideologies. Straying from the curriculum in classes to poke fun at Republican candidates, insult conservative media sources, enforce party stereotypes, allow insulting or degrading partisan discussions and promote partisan political messages that alienate students who are paying just as much for an academic education as their liberal counterparts counts as a deliberate disregard for the rights of these students to freedom of speech, beliefs and expression. This is not to say that all ideological discrimination goes one way. We are one community, and the fact that this intolerance is occuring is both the fault of those perpetrating it and those allowing it to take place. In general, we need to remember that we aren't simply addressing ideas, but the people behind them.

Having personally experienced ideological discrimination to a shocking degree, I can tell you that it is extremely frustrating to go out of my way to consider and respect my peers' opinions and in return, to be attacked or rejected from the conversation for expressing my own. From volunteer groups to classrooms, clubs, and dorms, these anti-right attitudes and stereotyping are both insultingly prevalent and tragically tolerated. While we are consistently bombarded with the message that stereotyping is a harmful dividing force in a community, political stereotypes are applied with such regularity, that I can't help but wonder if we as a student body have gone so far in believing them that we fail to categorize such pigeonholing as discrimination. We need to stop seeing a liberal as a certain type of person and a conservative as another. I hope my fellow students can at least agree with my saying that our opinions and ideologies are complex, and our beings far more complex. By reducing each other to elements of a category and falling prey to the primitive "us" and "them" mindset, we are missing out on the many nuances of peoples' opinions and therefore also failing to truly understand one another. By banking on these stereotypes, we are allowing ourselves to become more and more ignorant, and call me crazy but, I'm pretty sure an increase in ignorance wasn't quite what we were hoping for when we took out our rather large student loans.

We came to this University for its tolerance and variety, but it appears that, in the political realm at least, what is most socially tolerated is intolerance. Let us work to create a more productive intellectual environment by engaging in respectful modes of discourse that we can actually benefit from. And then perhaps someday we will truly be as tolerant as we know we ought to be.