What is the problem with public discourse at Pomona College? We think there are two big ones. The first is that there is no pointing out realities, no saying, “Look, here is how things work at Pomona,” without ruffling too many feathers for it to be worth your while – and without being condemned. This is why people don’t say intelligent or honest things about the hook-up culture. It is the reason why the same goes for racial discussions at Pomona. It is the case for any potentially contentious issue. Unless a person’s ideas conform to in-fashion dogma, that person is either silenced before entering the public arena, or, once inside, having craftily hidden his goods for the full-body search, he is summarily shouted down by the indignant voices of the crowd.¹  The result is that many good ideas go unshared, bad ideas remain uncorrected, institutionally backed minority views constitute one side of the dialogue and empty platitudes the other, and problems fester undiagnosed.

Under what conditions should we expect this stagnant and restrictive climate? Under what conditions is it logical? Speaking abstractly, in a truly liberal society, we should find it logical, or approaching logical, in times of fear, in situations when people are at risk of being harmed, i.e. when there is an important reason to sacrifice freedoms. For instance, the Supreme Court has ruled that suppression of free speech is justified when someone’s speech causes “a clear and present danger” for the public. Tranquil Pomona is insulated from real dangers; if there is any hope for free exchange of ideas in the U.S., it is on tucked-away campuses like ours.

So why doesn’t it happen? For a host of reasons, most of them bigger than us. The terms and conditions of our campus discourse have traveled down the cultural-political river to us; Locke and Jefferson were dumped in nearest to the mouth, and Vietnam and the Civil Rights Movement complicate matters closer to us, with an infinitude of other elements we do not understand tossed in alongside and between and subsequent to these players we have chosen to mention. In other words, we are too feeble to give you a good answer. What we can do is focus on what we see here, where the waters have stilled.

What we have noticed is the blanket of tolerance we indiscriminately throw over discourse at Pomona, which suffocates genuine ideas and prevents Pomona from being what we need it to be. Administrators, whose job it is to ensure that everybody is comfortable, stand on one edge of the campus and lay the blanket in place; students eager to participate and help the Pomona community flatten the rest of it out, until it fits nice and snug. These students are the tolerance censors. In academics, on essays and in the classroom, the students of Pomona have been schooled in phrase-mastery, rather than thought-mastery, and so it is right up the alley of our self-appointed tolerance censors to conduct a veritable Microsoft Word “Find search” on potentially intolerant speech and writing.  Did you use the word “superior”? “Social hierarchy”? Did you say “black”? “Race”? “Feminism”? Did you use incendiary language like “wrong”? “Stupid”? “Absurd”? Any one of these words is sufficient for you to be subject to a thorough review by the Campus Thought Police. For the trial phase: Did you group people by gender and then follow the grouping with one of the touchy criticism-phrases? Did you for instance say “a group of girls” and later in the paragraph write, “misguided”? We will have to shut you down. Did you employ combinations that have been red-flagged as anti-tolerance for the updated software? Did we catch that you uttered the words “equal rights protest” and “overblown” in the same sentence? Know that we respect you and your opinion, but by no means can you or your opinion be heard. 

The tolerance censors, whether they are newspaper editors or organizers of panel discussions or Saturday night partiers without an official position in the community, are the type who passively conduct their duties and stick by their unexamined clichés, and, like the customs agents who do not express personal interest in the tourist’s visit, they will each assure you that they themselves are never offended by what you say – they can stand controversial ideas just fine – but it is their job to protect others from offense. Secretly, they relish that they have tangible evidence that they are more tolerant, more upstanding, and more moral than whoever was caught in the act of thinking. They set precedent; if you do not notice them, if you have not seen them operate, or feel as if you are not personally restricted by them, this does not mean they have not had their impact on you. They are responsible for the standards that we all adhere to in public discourse – the standards we are conscious of and debate about, and the standards that have slid past us unnoticed and safely into the realm of the default. Their effect is far-reaching: no argument is free from being measured against the stringent criterion of superficial tolerance; it is not tolerance, but its caricature that we are subjected to.² Negativity, of all sorts, often falls under the “intolerance” umbrella, and so, no matter how true your words are, you will have a hard time voicing them if they are not sunny. Reality is not always sunny, and so large chunks of reality remain beneath the surface as well.

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The discourse we end up with is highly ideological and very flat. It reminds us of the national political discourse, and we do not like the national political discourse. Political rhetoric is dishonest, for one. What do political candidates want to do? What do Romney and Obama aim for in the debates? The same thing they aim for always: they are looking to get the most votes, by whatever means necessary. They consequently seek to balance their comments between not offending and finding agreement and position their statements within the preexisting discursive frameworks. Sometimes their calculations will instruct them to alienate a few in order to win the impassioned favor of others (Obama on taxes for the rich), but more often they will offer safe and uncontroversial self-testimonials or promises (“I have always been strong on terrorism.” “There is nothing I am more concerned about than fixing the unemployment problem in America.”) The most unsettling thing they do, and least dignified, is to juvenilely attempt to expose the inconsistent statements other candidates have made (“You said this last week, and now you’re saying the opposite. Liar! I caught you, liar!” And the satisfied smile afterwards? What are we watching?) We know why they act as they do – no use harping on it; we know they are talking not to us but to Median Voter Bob, who responds to those tactics. We think we can agree that we feel disappointed and unnourished after watching the debates. There is a manner in which Obama and Romney could speak (we hope) that would be meaningful for us, complex and not sound-bite-bitten, and these debates are not that. Mainstream political discourse is not that.

Our discourse should rise above the level of political discourse. The test is whether it fits into the same boxes, if it is similarly either directed at special interests or uncontroversial to the point of being superfluous, or whether, in contrast, it incites you to think – pushes you, as the cliché goes, to consider your opinions more closely.  We guess that there are more people out there who laugh at the placards placed on Frary tables than who say: “Hmm, interesting,” and that the articles in The Student Life are most regularly pegged as Onion-grade rather than as real news. We guess that people are not changing their opinions on the hook-up culture when the Women’s Union gives a talk on it; we are fairly certain that the feminist mission on campus is lost on the majority of non-feminists; that Workers for Justice, for all their tents and pickets, will not transcend their status as a fringe group; that the articles discussing rape on college campuses, though coming from a good place, are not turning heads; that people sense that the back-and-forths in the newspaper are mostly about which of the two writers is smarter; and that the sustainability zealots are not inspiring the masses. It is like when we hear Obama and Romney debate: we are stuck somewhere between, “Well, yeah, ok, I agree, but who doesn’t?” and “That’s someone else’s concern. Why should I care?”

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If the first problem with discourse at Pomona College is our silly tolerance addiction, what, then, is the second? Based on what we have described, it must be apathy. Problem one pales in comparison to this, for apathetic discourse betrays a deeper apathy, does it not? And is it too harsh to call our generation apathetic? Is it not apt to say that a troublingly ironic attitude toward public discourse belongs to a generation with a troublingly ironic attitude toward themselves? This, to us, is the bigger issue, the elephant in the room. Is it unreasonable to think that public discourse will be the key out of the claustrophobic room? Probably. Can a problem of the soul be set right with improved words? Perhaps not.

At any rate, some sort of maneuver must be attempted, and when devising it we might as well pay attention to what we have found to be wrong. It must be true that the discourse at Pomona is stuck in the mud, has been for some time now, and that people do not have the inclination to get behind it and push, or the faith that if they do, they’ll move it. We know that there are people, people we once laughed next to, who are content to stand on an overlooking hill and snicker at the pathetic ones in the vehicle. We are sick of laughing; we can only bear the same joke so many times. We are trying to help now. On the ground and exposed, we have given you all we could manage: a first shove.