Category: Opinions

“Look, honey, those girls are going to march for your rights.” Those were the words spoken by a beaming mother, to her smiling daughter, no more than seven years old, upon seeing five of my friends en route to the Women’s March in Washington D.C. Seeing this mother’s unassailable pride for her daughter in such a quiet moment, so far removed physically and tonally from the organized chaos of the protest, carried the most weight in my heart. Right there, I saw that what my friends and I were doing mattered to somebody, and it gave me the deepest satisfaction knowing it was coming from a place of such hope and love.

I attended the march because I believe quite strongly in the empowerment of women, driven by my own hope that my sister, my cousins, my female friends, and (Lord willing) my future daughters and nieces will grow up with the confidence that they could conquer the world – metaphorically at least. That was my reason for being in Washington two weekends ago, but I quickly realized that externally, my own rationale had been misinterpreted. Suddenly, I was being told that because I was a willing participant in the Women’s March, I was now a supporter and willing participant in the advancement of causes X, Y, and Z by matter of association; by proxy, all because I showed up to a march not anticipating the full implication of my being there. I find this concept ridiculous.

What I find the most ironic about this claim, in relation to the march in particular, is that the backlash facing its attendees has come exclusively from conservative sources, the same ones that have been so vehemently opposing claims by the left that a vote for Donald Trump was a normalization of racism, sexism, xenophobia, and so on and so forth. You know the spiel. I find that claim by the left to be similarly flawed. It’s a discussion for another time.

The irony here, however, to assert that being an active participation in a movement is somehow equivalent to supporting all aspects of said movement is an argument I find to be mostly unpersuasive. Isn’t the world too complicated for one political party to claim a complete moral authority on its behalf? Every issue deserves careful consideration and detailed examination. To assume that a coalition of any kind will be able to place all of its members in nice, tidy boxes is an unrealistic expectation.

Voting for a president, for example, can be an extremely tough judgment call. Our most recent election shows what happens when both leading candidates are burdened with checkered pasts and a handful of policies able to cast dark shadows over the whole of their campaigns. Voters faced a moral conundrum in 2016, unparalleled in recent memory, stuck with a choice many likened to “choosing the lesser of two evils.” This goes beyond the proverbial “skeletons in the closet,” beyond “grab ‘em by the pussy,” and beyond shady corporate ties. Not every Trump voter wanted the wall, not every Hillary voter shares her position on abortion, but both groups of voters exist. Did they sacrifice their morality and intellect by making a thoughtful, no doubt difficult calculation by selecting a candidate who they fail to align with on every issue down the ticket? I certainly don’t think so, but is it messy, of course.

When I showed up to the Women’s March, I was there for my own reasons, realized beautifully by the image of a mother wanting nothing less than the world for her daughter, full of hope that she would grow up capable of being exactly who she wants to be, untouchable by whatever malevolent forces that be that would have her believe she is deserving of anything less. There was a bevy of other causes represented at the march. I was on board with some, not so much with others, but they didn’t speak for me. I speak for me. Don’t call me what I’m not.

Houghton has been an influential place for me, and I’m sure many others can say the same.  It’s not perfect, but I have an education that I can be proud of.  While the community members, spiritual life activities, and athletics have all been apart of my “Houghton experience,” the classes and professors have been fundamental.  

These courses taught me how to learn, not what to learn.  Isn’t this what a liberal arts education is all about?  It was this commitment to a holistic education and the passion of the faculty members that drew me to Houghton in the first place, yet now I am feeling the rumblings of change. In my four years at Houghton, I have seen five (soon to be seven) professors in my departments leave or retire, and only one of them replaced.

Change is not necessarily a bad thing.  It is hard, no doubt, but there are beautiful discoveries and innovations with change. There are also terrible losses and destruction that come with change. Perhaps we need to reconsider the flux in tides when core values and guiding principles are at stake. To be honest, I wouldn’t recommend Houghton to prospective students based on the direction it is now going.

This realization is not an easy one to come to.  True, all of my departments are undergoing some type of downsizing (perhaps even removal), yet this is not what sparks my assertion. Coming from a humanities background, I do not simply want to blame it on the folks in Paine.  I also don’t want to fight against the tide of technology as online classes are on the rise.  As a pole vaulter who benefited immensely from its construction, I also don’t want to give into the easy bashing of KPAC (although it does seem to be a representation of where our priorities lie).  No, I think we need to pause and look closely at the changes that are taking place and ask ourselves if this is what we want.  What will Houghton look like ten years from now if it continues on this track of losing crucial faculty members without filling the gaps?

I’ve only been gone for a year, and already I’ve noticed a change.  After studying abroad for the Spring and Fall 2016 semesters, I was excited to return to Houghton and the caliber of classes that it offered. Yet upon looking at the Spring 2017 course offering, I was disappointed. There seemed to be only a handful of courses offered in my departments or areas of interest.  Additionally, the number of students in my classes has increased from an average of 10 to 12 people to 40 to 50 people. What happened to the 13:1 student-faculty ratio Houghton boasted when I was a prospective?

I was hoping to end my Houghton career with discussion-filled classes that would help me digest the many questions I returned home with after my time abroad in Nepal and India.  Instead, I am disappointed, both for myself and for those to come after me.

I know there are people on campus from all disciplines that came to Houghton for similar reasons that I did, and I assume there will be more students to come based on the sort of education it has offered.  Yet we must ask ourselves, what kind of education is this?  Is it one in which faculty members encourage questions, foster class discussion and engagement with difficult material, and care deeply about the material and the students?  Is it one that inspires students to be involved and committed to their classes, education, and overall development?  Is it one that sets high, yet achievable, expectations for students and faculty alike, so that we may never get comfortable in our knowledge?  Is it one that nurtures relationships that go beyond the classroom and graduation?  An old Maori proverb says, He aha te mea nui o te au? He tangata, he tangata, he tangata. What is the most important thing in the world?  It’s the people, it’s the people, it’s the people. We need to come together as a community of students, faculty, and staff and reassess our priorities. Are we placing emphasis on making cuts and boosting finances, or are we remembering the people who make us great?

A few days before Christmas, I sat in my apartment scrolling through my Facebook newsfeed as status’ were updated and GPAs were posted. Friends and family boasted of 4.0’s and 3.87’s. My sister even posted her own GPA in our family chat. When I finally summed up the courage to  check my grades, I was disappointed. I’d only managed to pull off a 3.489, only .011 short of The Dean’s List goal I’d set for myself at the beginning of the academic year. I felt inferior and inadequate.

My self-esteem plummeted, and despite having one of the best semesters of my academic career, I started questioning my intelligence. “You could have gotten higher grades. Why didn’t you work harder? How have you survived at Houghton? Everyone here is so smart. If I can’t do well in school, how can I survive after college?” I moped around for a few days, throwing myself a pity party, before self-reflection brought me to my senses.

No, I hadn’t made The Dean’s List. However, I’d worked three on-campus jobs, managed the newspaper, never missed a homework deadline, and showed up for nearly every class period. In addition to working harder than I ever had before, I’d finally mastered organization, formed a great work ethic, and grown as an individual. Looking back, the fall semester not only began preparing me for life after graduation, but for the person God wants me to be for the rest of my life. This semester was invaluable, despite my grades not being as great as some of my peers.

As students, it’s easy to wrap our identity and our GPA into one amorphous blob. We spend most of our lives striving to earn a letter on a piece of paper, so it makes sense that if that letter is less than perfect we feel inadequate. We’re told these letters are our golden ticket into life, without them you absolutely cannot succeed. The problem with this, however, is that schools are geared towards a linear way of thinking that only caters to a specific audience of students.

We reflected on this recently in my senior seminar for communication while discussing Daniel Pink’s book A Whole New Mind. In the book Pink discusses the societal shift from a very linear, logical way of thinking (left brained thinking) to a broader, more emotional way of thinking (right brained thinking). Reading this book helped me refine my previous self-reflection, gain insight to who I was at my very core, and aided in my understanding of the people who surround me on a daily basis. If you can’t tell by now, I’m incredibly right brained.

So no, my GPA wasn’t a 4.0. No, I can’t always follow a train of logic until it reaches the station and departs. But I’m passionate about what I believe in, I can look at a project in the beginning phases and see how I want it to look at the end, and I feel so deeply that I sobbed the first time I ran over an animal.

Having a great GPA isn’t a bad thing, in fact I admire people that excel easily in academics. However, we need to learn to value ourselves beyond our GPA, even if that’s what we’re great at. Even if you’re logical and linear in your thinking, you probably have activities you excel in beyond your school work. I have incredibly intelligent, left-brained friends who are compassionate teachers, loyal friends, talented artists, and even wonderful activists. So go on, get that A, but remember: the sum of your grades does not equal your identity.

January 21 saw a great deal of protesters. Cities across America and across the globe blocked off their streets for huge crowds to march in peaceful protest. People from all walks of life, with countless different views, joined together to seek equality and justice for women, and for the world.

A march such as this one should cause us to take a step back and examine ourselves. It should help us to look at the people protesting, and listen to the voices that speak peacefully, but insistently. We should ask ourselves why so many thousands of people feel the need to leave their homes and participate in a peaceful protest. Rather than immediate dismissal of the march as a whole, we should listen with open minds that seek to understand the messages being conveyed.

Photos of the march show numerous people, many of whom are holding signs with a variety of slogans on them. Some supported women’s health, some sought equal pay, some protested the language used by the newly-inaugurated President. The people walking side by side were championing a variety of different causes, but they were standing together, and were stronger for it. This march is a powerful display of people uniting for justice and equality, and I think they have a strong case backing them up. For all the protests of the past, there is still a great deal of injustice in our world. I might not agree with every voice that rises from the crowd of protesters, but I certainly agree with some. I won’t ignore all of the voices because I disagree with some of the people who participated in the Women’s March.

What will the world do in response to this global show of solidarity? I often feel that no matter how many people protest, nothing will change. Maybe some will listen, but this protest has the potential to be superficially noticed and handily ignored. Yet no matter how hard it is to remember on some occasions, history shows us that change is slow, but still possible. It is the small steps of change that eventually bring us miles from where we were. We can make the small step of listening a little more closely. We can be a part of the change that can occur in the world, in America, and in our own college.

This is not a perfect place, and it is not enough for us to go blindly on, failing to notice the hurts that exist where we are. What we can do, and are called to do as Christians, is hear the words of the people around us, who have voiced their concerns and fears. We can be more willing to show grace to each other, and more willing to listen to the worries of those around us. Houghton may not have had a Women’s March on the quad, but nevertheless, the voices protesting injustice will become clearer when, instead of ignoring them, we choose to listen.

This isn’t a solution, of course. Listening will not magically solve the many problems that are being faced. This is simply a reminder to have minds and hearts that are willing to look at things from different points of view. It would be arrogant to imagine that we can fix everything ourselves. What we can do is to think a little harder about the social justice questions that are being raised, and care a little more deeply for the people around us.

In protesting a new political establishment, plenty of women brought memorable signs (and some red flags) to nationwide marches this weekend. Diverse groups gathered across the country, in part to protest the repeal of the Affordable Care Act and its protections for women’s health. Yet last week The Atlantic reported that “New Wave Feminists,” a radical organization that disavows contraceptives, had been quietly dropped by march organizers.

While many will protest that contraceptives and abortion rights are crucial elements of public policy regarding women’s health, I often worry that feminists, myself included, have disproportionately elevated these issues. If you search the internet for the phrase “women’s health united states,” nearly every news article focuses on one of these topics. Most are full of harsh, divisive rhetoric.

Borne along on the embittered battle cry of “My body, my choice,” feminists have forgotten that our choices affect bodies other than our own, and that private choices have public consequences. We’re quick to protest that female bodies aren’t sex objects and to argue that we’re “more than a (insert reproductive organ here),” but fill our Internet spaces with articles about our right to have whatever kind of sex we prefer. And we’re quick to slap a derogatory label on anyone who raises an objection. No uterus? No opinion.

This makes some sense. Humans have an appetite for the salacious, and if we can reduce an issue to sex, then we will. But when we choose to frame the women’s health issue exclusively in terms of contraception and abortion rights and deny the other side’s right to any opinion, we ensure that our advocacy for women’s healthcare will never progress beyond those two incredibly volatile topics.

Did you know that the Affordable Care Act requires insurers to cover domestic violence counseling and cervical cancer screenings? That it prohibits insurers from denying coverage based on preexisting mental health problems like depression, which disproportionately affect women? That it provides prenatal care to low-income mothers? These issues need as much publicity as their more provocative counterparts.

Defaulting to anger over perceived bigotry or promiscuousness is a familiar, enjoyable conflict in which everyone knows their place. But finding civil common ground about the value of the non-sexualized female body is essential for helping the minimum-wage salaried moms whose insurance policies don’t cover breast pumps and the elderly women who can’t afford mammograms. Our grandstanding perpetuates a circuitous modern irony: the argument becomes its own end, and one side’s victory becomes the defeat of both.

Solving the complex issue of women’s health access will require discussions with people who disagree widely. In the past few years I’ve had some thought-provoking dialogues with people whose opinions are not my own, and whose questions have forced me to examine my own convictions about culture and consent. As we enter an uncharted political scene, let’s resolve to prioritize these kinds of conversations, to value the whole female body, and to never prioritize vindication over advocacy.