Mercier responds to students
Dear Editors,
I note with as much shame as dismay that after two weeks, and much student energy devoted to demanding my resignation, only two people have so far taken responsibility and issued public apologies for the Aberdeen violence. One is Principal Hitchcock, who promptly goes on about how Queen’s students gathered the next morning to clean up the mess. (Well, I don’t know how many gathered in total but I was there for quite a while that morning, and what I saw were all of five students with brooms.) The other person who took responsibility for his actions and apologized was the young black KCVI student who took full front-page flack for Queen’s students. I guess this is personal responsibility, Queen’s style.
I note with equal dismay that, after publishing in two successive editions of the Journal one article, one editorial—which itself fans the flames of self-righteous student outrage by pretending to ignore what I am quoted as saying in the preceding Journal—and countless letters attacking everything from my personal integrity to my devotion to my students, this Journal claimed “there was not enough space” to print [the letter] I sent on Sept. 29, in which I expressed regret about the many who took offence at my wording, and in which I explained why I could not in good conscience apologize for the point I was making, was relegated along with other leftovers to the online edition which my students themselves told me they simply never read. I guess this is responsible journalism, Queen’s style.
I sincerely regret that, as one student surmised, “the Jewish community, the Roma community, the gay and lesbian community, the Polish community, the Catholic community, etc.” all took offence at my statement. Dare I say this before the thought police: that some truths offend is no reason to them over in silence. The current knee-jerk taking-offence is especially regrettable since I was making a point with which I’m sure all these people would agree. That point is precisely that the propensity to rescind on one’s responsibility as a rational person, however harmless it may seem, is very, very dangerous. Lest we forget.
It has been brought to my attention that the following age of mine in the Toronto Star which read “Your newspaper [the Toronto Star] reports that ‘a black police officer at the scene became the target of racial slurs …’” would normally have been interpreted as my suggesting that the Aberdeen party had a racist undertone, indeed, that Queen’s students in general are racist. I am not only willing, but eager, to apologize if that is a normal interpretation of what I said. I myself was witness to an incident of racial slur, a different one it turns out from the ones that Insp. Cookman of the Kingston Police was reporting in the Star. But I never meant to suggest that the Aberdeen party was a racist party—however overwhelmingly white it was—nor that Queen’s students are any more racist than the population at large.
Unfortunately, like the infantile Journal, most students who have expressed opinions so far (unlike most adults, who have offered their ) have chosen to deflect criticism away from themselves by giving it the grossest possible interpretation … and then comforting themselves that they are not as bad as all that. In a letter to the Journal, one student wrote “It might be the case [—note the “might”—] that we, the students, were belligerent, drunk and irresponsible, but no matter how irresponsible, we were not evil incarnate.” Fine. But neither were the 10-year-olds who got sucked into the Hitler youth.
Humans are wont to hear what they want to hear rather than listening to what one is obviously saying—another form of abdication of thinking. My remarks were meant to provoke self-critical reflection. It is self-servingly deaf to hear them as minimizing the worst horror in human history. What I really regret about having dared to use the verboten H-word is the convenient, easy out it gave those students who would rather concentrate on irrelevancies than face up to well-deserved criticism. My mistake was to expect better than that from Queen’s students. And you have no idea how sad and sorry I am about that.
It is not I who, as the editorial stated, “proliferated a false image of Queen’s as an out-of-control school lacking any structure or morals.” You have only your peers to thank for that. And if you think your education would be better served by a professor who refrained from denouncing such pathetic ethical standards, then let me suggest you go on thinking some more.
Adèle Mercier
Department of Philosophy
Editorial further damages reputation
Dear Editors,
RE: “Aberdeen coverage too sensational” (Journal, Sept. 30, 2005).
This poorly argued editorial is an embarrassment to the Journal, and is further evidence that a significant segment of the Queen’s student population is arrogant, self-righteous and totally unwilling to take responsibility for what takes place at their school. To characterize the events that took place on Aberdeen as “the misbehaviour of a select group of kids” is inaccurate and irresponsible. This editorial does further damage to the already tarnished reputation of Queen’s University.
Sean McGrady
ArtSci ’03
Hold students to community standards
Dear Editors,
I am less disturbed by the hooliganism on Aberdeen than I am of the self-righteous, defensive posturing of so many students in its aftermath. The propensity to lay blame on police, party guests or the infrastructure deficiencies of Canada’s richest “ghetto” makes us seem more irresponsible and self-important than a single act of vehicular arson ever could.
The police have, in essence, allowed Queen’s students to conduct an illegal annual street party on the unspoken bargain that it be contained, safe and reasonably respectful of the public good. That was an extraordinary privilege most Kingstonians would never expect for themselves. But Queen’s students seem to have mistaken the privilege as a right … not only to flout bylaws in pursuit of a good time, but as a right to impose our will on the community.
Queen’s students repeatedly trot out a list of feeble arguments for exempting themselves from community standards: we’re spending millions in an ungrateful city, we’re victims of greedy landlords, the police are rude to us, winter sidewalks are too slick, etc. But these arguments, and the exceptionalist attitudes they foster are the true damning legacies of incidents like the Aberdeen fracas.
A campus culture of snotty exceptionalism harms more than a school’s reputation. It harms its ability to change because it feeds an over-starched sense of self-worth. For all Queen’s history, facilities and brain trust, snooty student attitudes evoke a school punching well below its weight in of leaders produced, ideas generated and values instilled.
Great universities are not made by new facilities, average entering grades or even the blessings of school spirit. Great universities are made by the commitment of their students to bear responsibility not only for themselves, but for their communities. You can’t lead citizens if you can’t act like one. Queen’s cannot be good to the world, or even Canada, if it cannot be good to its own home, Kingston.
Edward Thomas
Sci ’06
Alumnus recounts run-in with police
Dear Editors,
I was traveling westward on Earl Street past Aberdeen Street at about 10 p.m. when a police officer approached me, grabbed my bottle of wine, popped the cork out and poured it out. When I asked what he was doing he grabbed my index finger and pushed it hard into my body, spraining it. I asked for his badge number and he was very reluctant to give it to me. He threatened me several times before finally giving me the number. Even after I got the number he continued to threaten me saying, quote, “You don’t wanna mess with me buddy.”
I am a peaceful person who was just trying to have a good time, I was not out to harm anyone. As Queen’s alumni I am startled by the increased enforcement on Aberdeen Street over the years and I feel the increase in police presence has only proven to push the students to an increase in rebellion and violence. The trend is clear. I hope that Queen’s takes this matter very seriously and makes their voice clear with the City of Kingston and Kingston Police. I feel these actions were incredibly unjust and my hope is to make Queen’s and the Queen’s community aware of these kinds of abuses of power.
Bob Cole
ArtSci ’04
Lack of diversity on campus a reality
Dear Editors,
RE: “Professor’s letter draws fire” (Journal, Sept. 30, 2005).
AMS President Ethan Rabidoux was recently reported as having objected to Queen’s students being “typecast and stereotyped as white, middle-class students.” Let me point out the elephant that our president and so many Queen’s students don’t seem to (want to) see: Queen’s is no tossed salad, it’s no melting pot, it’s barely even a mosaic. At best it is an overly pale mosaic, where colours seem to have cropped up almost by mistake.
However, in the context of the situation in which these remarks were made, it doesn’t even matter what the overall Queen’s student population looks like. Rabidoux was responding to observations made by Adèle Mercier, who pointed out that last weekend’s Homecoming party on Aberdeen Street was a predominantly white party. Let’s not stretch our polite self-deceptions so far now that we begin to pretend that it wasn’t breathtakingly pathetic that the one photograph that the Kingston Whig-Standard decided to feature on its front page the following Monday was of a young black man—who didn’t even go to Queen’s. The pictures of thousands of (as far as I could tell) white kids partying were saved for the inside pages. And these were pictures taken by a Queen’s student.
I’d like to believe that this year will be different from past years and that this year Queen’s student government will show initiative in improving the image Queen’s has consistently projected among prospective students, but when our president is so quick to defend what needs to be itted—that Queen’s is surprisingly and disturbingly white, despite the ethnic diversity of the student populations in neighbouring cities and universities—I think I’m going to have shelve my bubble-bursting hopes and settle for yet another bland year of collective self-deception and willful colour blindness.
Fathima Cader
ArtSci ’07
Police action on Aberdeen not brutality
Dear Editors,
I’m not sure which I find more enraging: the drunken antics of 5,000 students on Homecoming Saturday night or the specious self-serving comments from students “justifying” their conduct, printed in the Journal. The police and fire department were trying to do their job, something that students were making impossible by their own behaviour. Tell me: how is mobbing an ambulance a “protest against authority?” Turning over and burning someone’s car is OK because the Kingston police haven’t responded to a theft? Sorry. I police brutality when I was a student in the U.S. in the late ’60s. This isn’t it. There is no excuse for the Aberdeen riot, and efforts to justify it or to blame others for it merely make the students look worse.
Molly Wolf
Special student, Queen’s Theological College
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