February 23, 2012
Boarding a plane to come to Hamilton as an international student, a few assumptions were fairly easy to arrive at. A school of Hamilton’s stature must have a sizable international community. A school with Hamilton’s student body, where more than 40 percent of every junior class studied abroad, meant that the international perspective would be valued on campus. A school of Hamilton’s determination to teach how to write effectively meant that this perspective would be given the tools it needed to flourish, and to propagate itself to create a learning experience for everyone who’d walk the Hill as a Hamiltonian.
However, walking on the Hill for now over a semester, I feel I realize how misleading my assumption was. For here on the Hill, the perspective of the international student is often undervalued, at times undermined and, every once in a blue moon, is repulsively battered. For where most of the campus community deals with the international students in a debonair manner, asking questions and cherishing cultural difference, every now and then, someone rises up in the haughty complex of cultural superiority, and chooses to exploit the differences rather than embrace the similarities, and in doing so, effectively butchers the possibility to appreciate the diversity on campus.
One such narrative comes from a friend, who narrates that when he first got in touch with his roommate over Facebook to start to talk to him, the current status read something to the effect of “They ask me how likely I am to interact with someone from another culture, when my roommate is from (country of origin). Can I just put a curtain up in the room and pretend that he doesn’t exist?” To think that a Hamilton student, with all his accomplishments and enlightened viewpoint for which he earned the acceptance letter, would be biased against the idea of having to room with an international student, making judgments about it before even knowing their international counterpart is horrific, at best.
Similar treatment with students using “no offense” before calling someone’s culture poor, bizarre, inhumane or f***ed up just gives vent to the same negativity. Why are we so inclined to reject anything that doesn’t meet our criteria of right or wrong? Isn’t that what a liberal arts education is about, to find the point of divergence and to learn from it, and then gracefully making through it, without being disrespectful? Isn’t that exactly what makes the 50k education worth its salt? Yet somehow, the very notion of that experience of cultural gain that some spend a year abroad for, being brought here on a silver platter in the form of the international community is being undermined by a few people’s biases rooted in the youthfulness ignorance.
So to think how Hamilton brings to us international voices from all over the world for its unique experience, and somehow the way that voice is muted is something that I feel is a pressing problem here on campus; one that doesn’t merely shut off the possibility of this liberal arts community becoming the melting pot of experiences and perspectives that it is meant to be, but also causing problems for the international students at times. If Hamilton College is all about raising your voice and letting your opinions being heard, then, From Where I Sit, that voice is either being undervalued, tuned out or worse yet, at times, being tossed into thin air.