In Evan Coyne Maloney's new documentary, "Indoctrinate U," a Columbia University student is featured screaming, "Just stop it!" at a student protest. What caused the student's ire was an "affirmative action bake sale" several weeks earlier. In an attempt to illustrate the double standards used by admissions offices, the organizers of the bake sale offered cupcakes at different prices depending on the race of the customer.
William Henchy, author of the Sept. 24th op-ed titled, "Primary Source: please just stop it," must have been at the rally. As a "political conservative," Henchy believes he has more legitimacy in criticizing The Primary Source than liberals do.
Unfortunately, however, reactionary political correctness exists on both sides of the aisle. For years at Tufts, a small number of conservatives have let their fear of being ostracized by liberal peers cloud their judgment.
As for Henchy's statement that "the admissions office has had a policy of deliberately accepting politically conservative applicants" as a demonstration of affirmative action, I urge the admissions office to release all of their guidelines and statistics on conservatives as well as for all student groups. If Dean Coffin is indeed enforcing this policy, The Primary Source would be unequivocally opposed to it.
Moreover, how does Coffin know which students are conservatives? Most prospective students do not write their college essays on why they believe George Bush legitimately won the 2000 election. Henchy's unsubstantiated claim leaves much to be explained and only reinforces the Source's original argument that affirmative action of any kind leads to speculation about the merits of certain students who might have been accepted regardless of the practice.
The Source has been the boogeyman at Tufts for way too long. Someone would be hard-pressed to pick up a Daily from the first month of school without seeing an op-ed written about the magazine. The campus is apparently more concerned with attacking The Primary Source than the military junta in Burma. This "blame the Source" mentality serves a convenient role for many insecure students who wish to obfuscate real problems and avoid tackling taboo issues.
In Daily op-eds, Source editorials and letters and interviews with major Boston newspapers, we have more than adequately defended ourselves. Although one wouldn't believe it by only reading the Daily, even an article in the radical Boston Phoenix read, "Parody is an inherently risky art form, but here the magazine's intention was reasonably clear: The authors deployed obviously exaggerated racist stereotypes in order to rehash the as-old-as-affirmative-action counterargument to affirmative action - namely, that affirmative action operates on an assumption of black racial inferiority."
Concerning our radical Islam special section, the same Phoenix article stated that it, "contained a list of [assuredly] factual statements regarding radical Islam." Not quite the descriptions University President Lawrence Bacow sent out to the Tufts community. Those who choose to disingenuously interpret the pages of our magazine do so at the peril of their own education. I just hope they don't also think that Jonathan Swift feasts on poor children.
With that said, I am not writing this op-ed to defend The Primary Source, nor to attack our critics. I am writing it to redirect attention to the important issues of our times. The first of the many issues that The Primary Source hopes to address is fundamentalist Islam's flagrant disregard of basic human rights.
We invite the LGBT Center, Women's Center, Pan-African Alliance, Pangea and MSA to join us for "Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week," beginning October 22nd. All of these student groups should be concerned by the human rights abuses being perpetrated throughout the Muslim world.
In the meantime, I once again urge the student body at Tufts to engage The Primary Source in debating this issue, or any of their choosing. Send us letters, submit articles and even stop us in the street to talk.
For the sake of Tufts University, the Source won't stop now, nor will we ever.
