Most of the reportage that this newspaper does is quite local. Something happens on campus, and we cover it. In the process, we may speak with students, faculty and staff. We speak with, that is, people we know, at least as people who are affiliated with Connecticut College. It’s a pretty straightforward process. We interview them, write down what they say, add commentary and background, and we have ourselves an article. I tried something different for this article. I spent a Saturday afternoon a month ago wandering around Yale in an attempt to figure out more clearly why students were protesting and why these flashpoints keep happening across the country, including here at Conn. It turns out that investigative journalism is harder than I thought. First I had to get there. That was hard. And it didn’t help that I misremembered the train time and so arrived twenty minutes late. I ended up sitting in a coffee shop for a couple of hours and pacing the train station for the third until another train came in midway through the afternoon. So much for arriving in the morning. And when my train arrived in New Haven around 3:40, with the sun scheduled to set before 5:00 and my sense of direction so nonexistent that finding my way around Yale’s campus became a project, then I had less time. Oh, the excitements of travel.
When the first person I asked about the tense campus climate declined to speak on it (“No thank you”) I wasn’t very hopeful that the article that I had expected to write – about what’s happening at Yale and why similar events keep happening on campuses across the country – would come together. And it didn’t. I didn’t discover much new in terms of the contested issues that hasn’t been stated elsewhere, and I won’t restate them here.
During my investigation, I had two experiences. Most students didn’t want to talk. Two would speak to me, but offered to do so only off the record. Each choice suggests that they didn’t have a confident response to the issues, which only emphasizes how complicated and potentially divisive these issues are. Perhaps no one wanted to say something that they might regret later. People didn’t want to have their words attached to them because they didn’t know what they thought. That is, what they thought was likely changing, influenced, among other things, by the opinions of the people around them. Of course, people’s thinking can always change. But it has the potential to change differently, more quickly, in a moment of upheaval like the moment of upheaval that Yale and other campuses across the country are experiencing. In such upheaval, people often keep quiet when they don’t know what to think. They speak when they think of something that they believe they will be able to stand behind.
Or, perhaps the students’ views weren’t changing, and they were simply uncomfortable voicing an opinion that might elicit a backlash. In a time of upheaval and fear, people can feel pressured to voice the socially acceptable response. This sort of mob mentality can limit dialogue because it forces people to try to stay one step ahead of the other person, always guessing the reaction that their words might draw and preemptively tailoring their words to that reaction. This is especially true in times of upheaval and fear, when people don’t know who their friends are. (Indeed, determining whom one’s allies are is the first step in any sort of group protest.) In such situations, it can feel as if there is no room for respectful disagreement, and so people choose not to speak.
If the Yale students I spoke to understood anything, it was how tenuous and provisional their understanding was. There is a story, with many actors, in this fear and discomfort. Both despite and because of these many actors, this fear and discomfort actually resulted in a paucity of voices. It resulted in speculation, of which this article is a part. This is, I think, a story of a place that, while it is supposed to be a community, is not in fact a community. Community is impossible while people feel that they cannot express their views. The truth of this is being borne out in demonstrations on college campuses across the country right now, including here at Conn.
This attempt at investigative journalism, travel and all, reminded me of the purposes of a newspaper. When I realized that whatever I could write about Yale would certainly not be – could not be – a terminal story, I remembered that a newspaper is not meant for terminal stories. It’s periodic, iterative. It’s a snapshot in time of what we think at that time. •
