Unfortunately, those looking for real leadership on the part of Scripps College in the wake of the horrendous shooting of Gabrielle Giffords SC ’93 will have to look elsewhere than the statements of its president, Lori Bettison-Varga. President Bettison-Varga uses the tragedy of the Tucson shooting to play politics, rather than seek understanding.
President Bettison-Varga does this by trying to connect the perceived rhetoric of some in our country with the actions of a lone psychotic while conveying a false intimacy by referring to Ms. Giffords by her first name, “Gabrielle.” (She went by “Gabby,” as everyone knows.)
Apparently, President Bettison-Varga didn’t take logic, for if she had, she would know that it is a fallacy to assume a rational motive for a non-rational actor.
Let’s go line by line with her piece in Inside Higher Ed, starting with the four paragraph.
Listen to her own words. In her 2009 commencement address at Scripps, Congresswoman Giffords told our students: “The safety of the world depends on your saying ‘no’ to inhumane ideas. Standing up for one’s own integrity makes you no friends. It is costly. Yet defiance of the mob, in the service of that which is right, is one of the highest expressions of courage I know.” Prescient words.
Ms. Giffords is a public servant. She’s likely given dozens, if not hundreds, of speeches in her time in office, including a public recitation of the First Amendment. Lots of speeches means you can pick and choose what you’ll use.
To say these words are “prescient” is to assume that the words “have or show knowledge of events before they take place. Those words would be “prescient,” if Giffords were shot by a mob, but she wasn’t. Again, let’s repeat: she was shot by a lone actor, by a mad man. (If we want to play these games of calling language prescient, we could say that Giffords language could be considered “prescient” when she bucked the Democratic “mob” — by voting against Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) for the speakership and displaying a kind of political courage all too rare in Washington.)
Let’s continue with the Bettison-Varga piece:
Public service, in all forms, is courageous. Respectful disagreement — the ability to hear another’s viewpoint despite your own, without hate and distortion — has been lost in the current political climate.
And “respectful disagreement” has also been lost at Scripps College where Ms. Giffords was a student and where I have taken classes in my status as a student at Claremont McKenna College, right across the street. (Together, Scripps and Claremont McKenna are a part of the Claremont College consortium.)
As a professor at Scripps, President Bettison-Varga said nothing of the contemptuous manner in which feminist Ayaan Hirsi Ali was treated on Scripps’s campus, nor did she say anything as president when Newt Gingrich was asked disrespectful questions by Scripps students. She said nothing when a Scripps dean of students accused the entire Claremont McKenna class of 2010 of being racist and sexist for a flyer that showed a white guy dancing with two black women. Finally, she said nothing when Scripps student government official Rachael Ballard SC ’11 attacked white and Asian students for having the temerity to attend a Kwanzaa event on campus, even though such language is “hate speech” by the college’s admittedly over broad definition.
Gabrielle Giffords believes in her calling to enact change through the political process in an open, honest, and authentic manner, without harsh criticism or inflammatory rhetoric.
But you see, dear reader, only certain kinds of “change” is acceptable. Scripps College criminalizes some thought it finds unacceptable. It even attacks “stupid drunks” for daring to draw on white boards and was called out by the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education repeatedly.
Bettison-Varga continues:
Gabrielle deeply appreciated her liberal arts education: the exposure to different ideas, different ways of thinking. In her words: “What Scripps forced you to grapple with was a peeling back of the human onion in order to discover the supreme value of the soul and how crucial it is to maintain personal integrity and honesty.” She believes in free exchange of ideas, understanding difference, and taking a stand based on rational and critical reasoning. As Martha Kantor said to the Annapolis Group in 2010, “A liberal arts education teaches us [that] empathy is hard-learned, but demagoguery is easy.”
But some demagoguery is OK, apparently, especially when Scripps administrators police what students drunkenly write on their white boards.
Bettison-Varga helpfully lectures us on what we can learn from the tragedy.
What can we take away from this tragedy? We have a responsibility to the victims and their families to learn from this event. A senseless act must be turned into an opportunity for this country to unify, to learn from Gabrielle Giffords about the power of constructive and collaborative dialogue. To embrace human dignity, to resist the temptation to point fingers and blame, but to change the discourse for the betterment of our future. We are, after all, a democracy — a democracy that requires an empathetic and knowledgeable citizenship and respects the right to disagree.
President Bettison-Varga would presume to tell us what is “constructive” and “collaborative” dialogue and presumably to limit that which is not. As someone who has lived under the spectre of speech codes for nearly four years, despite their illegality in California even at private colleges, please don’t let college presidents like Lori Bettison-Varga — or one-time college professors, like President Obama — set the parameters for what is acceptable speech.
We should prefer incivility to silence induced by fear. We should follow the example of John Green, who must burry his 9-year old daughter, who nevertheless understands that it, “in a free society we’re going to be subject to people like [Loughner]; I prefer this to the alternative.”
That’s a hard lesson to take, but it’s one that needs to be taught at Scripps College, in Tucson, and everywhere else.
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