Ithaca College’s student government has the perfect antidote for those pesky “microaggressions”: A new online reporting system where students can tattle on their classmates’ “belittling” or “isolating” words and/or behavior.
If you’re new to the definition of “microaggression,” here’s Ithaca freshman (isn’t that very term a sexist microaggression?) Angela Pradhan to assist you:
“[M]icroaggressions are statements by a person from a privileged group that belittles or isolates a member of an unprivileged group, as it relates to race, class, gender, sexual orientation, ability and more. Examples include statements like ‘Where are you really from?’ ‘You speak good English,’ and ‘You don’t look disabled.’”
Thanks, Angela.
Q: How has the response been from your SGA and student peers?
Angela Pradhan: From SGA, a lot people supported it. They were confused about how it would actually play out, but they voted yes.
Senator-at-large Josh Kelly voted no because he believed that the intent…was the legal action. My thing for this is not to have legal action as the immediate or first priority or first step.
This is just a reporting system. Legal action wasn’t even at the forefront of our agenda. It’s more so that there is an actual documentation of events.
Q: So it’s more for record-keeping?
AP: Record-keeping but with impact. It’s not that we are going to keep these records and not do anything about these instances.
But it’s not to the degree that every instance will require trial or some kind of harsh punishment.
Q: Would that mean working with the victim, or the person who allegedly committed the microaggression, or both?
AP: That would be worked out on a case by case basis. We are working on getting a committee formed. People are asking who is this going to be reported to. We are working on getting a committee of administrators to really work on this, because there was an existing council already of administrators in the late 90s and early 2000s.
There’s still a lot to be worked out, Pradhan says.
If that last response from Pradham doesn’t worry you, even a little bit, then you must be fairly comfortable with Ithaca becoming a tiny totalitarian institution within central New York State.
As Reason’s Nick Gillespie says, “Pretty sure that’s what happened in Salem during the witch-trial days.”
He adds: “So remember, kids, you don’t go to college to learn new things and feed your head. You go to college to be subjected to an anonymous system of collecting information about the bad thoughts you have and the misstatements you make, some of which you might not even have intended to be hurtful.”
Read the full Ithaca Voice article.
h/t to Reason.
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