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Re: serious bzns!

koipool
2008-05-05 07:14 pm UTC (link)

Hi, I'm totally late to the party here but I feel the need to speak in defense of my school. We have a bad reputation for conservatism, but we really aren't that conservative up here -- IIRC something around 85% of our campus voted Democrat in 2004, and it was certainly due in part to the efforts of our local liberals that New Hampshire went blue instead of red in that election. The Review is indeed very conservative, but it's also not taken very seriously by the majority of campus (and we do also have a liberal newspaper, in addition to The Dartmouth, which actually tends to skew liberal). From an institutional standpoint we now have green and gender-neutral housing, which I think are decent steps forward, and we also have a kickass Women and Gender Studies program that outshines a lot of other departments (including mine, sadly, oh well).

Which is not to say we haven't had our fair share of scandals, and I won't deny that individual students may be sucky, because they might be. Every school has its sucky students. I've experienced plenty of suck here. But I cringe whenever anyone rails against us for being conservative, or says that something like this should be "expected" from us, because... really, I've been here for five years, and I've had classes with women and people of color, and I've never encountered an environment of hostility towards a professor like what was described by this one. I've seen some terrible professors, and anger on the part of students, but even then, nothing like this.

More importantly, I feel like taking blatant insanity like this seriously and giving it attention has the potential to undermine and trivialize actual complaints that may legitimately occur. The more attention this gets, the harder it's going to be for the woman who actually gets harassed to come forward.

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	Re: serious bzns! redwarrior 2008-05-06 09:18 pm UTC (link)
	applause (Reply to this)(Parent)

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