So when one of those 1,600 students gets attacked, I know that gossip is not helpful. Gossip, in fact, is detrimental, is damaging, is poisonous. But gossip is all we’ve gotten. This guy said this and this girl said that and I heard … What would have been fantastic would be someone, anyone, in a position of authority saying something beyond “There was an incident involving a knife at 12:51 a.m.” in an e-mail with a bland subject line and no priority listing.
In the real world, people get stabbed all the time. They get shot, they get beaten and bloodied up because humans operate through violence. But Amherst functions on the belief that it is not a reflection of the real world, that it is a small, elite congregation of the most focused minds in the country — maybe in the world. So a stabbing in our small, elite bubble is actually a big deal. It should, at the very least, get a red exclamation point in my Outlook inbox.
I’ve heard that, following the “incident,” there were dorm meetings across campus. Maybe it’s because I’m in a senior dorm (although why should that matter?), maybe it’s because I’m just settling in after a semester away, but I heard absolutely nothing about these until well after the fact. I know that Student Security has been in meeting after meeting regarding upping their measures, but Student Security is a small group in a small population. All that the rest of us got was the administration’s single-paragraph, exceptionally vague e-mail addressing the “incident” and the subsequent exclusivity of Amherst functions.
It took four days for some semblance of fact to come out through the Student. Four days of gossip running rampant — because “the victim” said this and the “assailant” did this and the knife was in his sleeve or maybe in his hat — or, maybe even worse, complete silence on the subject, as if “the victim” wasn’t one of us or of any consequence. Maybe even worst of all, by the Monday after “the incident,” professors were already joking about it, grouping it with that Registrar security breach as an example of “Amherst Gone Wild.”
We’re supposed to bring light to the world. That’s our credo, our charge when we graduate. We produce some of the brightest minds in the world, we walk amongst some of the brightest minds in the world, but at a moment when we all needed the simplest, most basic form of illumination, we failed. Terras Irradient, Amherst.
-Dee Mandiyan ’10