Response to Jordan Fish

Your response to Jake Cuttler was both unfair and counterproductive to anything even resembling intellectual discourse. If you were truly offended by Jake’s article, or felt that it dehumanized the Mocon staff, what do you gain from immediately throwing out attacks like “narcissistic” or “boring”? Does that in any way contribute to a civil dialogue? Maybe you expected Jake to thank you for opening his eyes to issues that he had never previously thought about when he read, “Why does Wesleyan keep letting in the exact same person?” Words like these, of which your whole article seemed to consist, completely ignore any of the issues that you make clear have upset you so much and seek only to establish a sort of intellectual monopoly on your part. Your article failed to make me, as a reader of the Argus, aware of what in Jake’s piece could be taken as offensive, but it pompously assured me of your moral and intellectual superiority to him. Nobody learns anything from such hateful debate, and it has no place in progressive politics or thought. It seems, however, that as long as you have something mean to say that makes you sound remotely intelligent (we readers like it when we are able to show that we understand words like narcissistic), Wesleyan will listen. I expect that this article will elicit some kind of impersonally personal attacks (you don’t know me, after all, so how can they really be personal?), but I have almost come to expect that here. Any illusions I had about Wesleyan as an open-minded environment in which people engage in intelligent dialogue are slowly erased each time I open to this section of the Argus and whenever I hear the word conservative uttered on campus. So, if you are thinking of asking me why I have not defended Jake’s article, it is because you have given me nothing to defend it against, except for the dehumanization, which, for a school full of progressives, seems so rampant here, of those who might disagree with us. I am not asking you to agree with everyone. I am asking only that, instead of treating those who disagree with you as non-persons so that you can talk over them, try talking to them as one human to another. Maybe you’ll learn something.