I am just a freshman here at Harvard, and one of those poor inductivist freshmen that have nothing but a few months of college experience to look back to when they attempt to make sense of what is going on around them. Nevertheless, it is no overstatement to say that a lot has happened just in one year: the canceling of Visitas due to the Boston marathon bombings, the announcement of a six-billion dollar capital campaign, the victory of a “joke” campaign for the Undergraduate Council, and all the frenzy surrounding the bomb hoax on campus. Whether we have just been living in a particularly agitated moment or we still need to process that this is just everyday life at Harvard, we often find ourselves at the center of the media’s attention without much warning or preparation for it.
In the past week, yet another alarming story reached the public and has been shaking our community. This time around, however, it all happened differently, starting from within very our cyberwalls. It was the students who proactively drove the public’s attention to a cry for help by someone that could not afford to have her voice heard too distinctively. By now we all have read the anonymous op-ed about reaching out for assistance and finding a discouraging dearth of not only administrative support but also human empathy. We blogged and re-blogged, shared and re-shared the op-ed, until the media picked it up and turned it into a worldwide headline.
To little surprise, the administration reacted quickly. Emails flooded in from several resident deans, Harvard College Interim Dean Donald Pfister, and ultimately President Drew Faust. All showed a great deal of concern and good intention, diplomatically reminding students that there are resources available to us. But these e-mails seem to address the media rather than the original op-ed’s real request and source of distress, which is the lack of intervention after the troubling events. The emails only focus on prevention rather than resolution, much like a doctor who warns people not to sneeze on each other but refuses to cure them when they actually get sick.
On the one hand, therefore, the Harvard administration needs to be able to examine its own faults and make serious improvements. On the other hand, however, Harvard students are coming dangerously close to turning a delicate matter into a circus of rushed statements and polarized opinions. As soon as the op-ed was published, a rain of articles, opinion pieces, and comments have poured down on the matter, resulting in a disordered grappling of words that cause more damage than help.
In this explosion of rushed reactions, we risk failing to understand that our contribution should be to bring the issue to the administration’s attention and call for prompt action on their part rather than jump straight to conclusions. Incentivized by an inefficient administrative system (but certainly animated by good intentions), we are susceptible to making the mistake of overestimating our role and taking the whole matter in our own hands, as if we could somehow serve as the prosecutor, witness, and judge of a trial we hurriedly set up ourselves. Any guesses on what the verdict would be?
We would then have to protect ourselves not only from all the frenzy caused by off-campus media attention, but more terrifyingly, also from an internal army of judgment-armed hounds waiting to be unleashed. Even before the university would be able to take any necessary steps to investigate the matter further and potentially take final action, we would end up mistaking what are only hypotheses as certified truth. We must remember that even hypotheses that are most likely to be true are still only hypotheses, and hypotheses sometimes might not correspond to reality.
And if this were to be the case, any accused person could become the sacrificial victim of the consequent speculation landslide in our rushed cybertrial. Before any closer look could cast a doubt on the misfortunate’s supposed guilt, his life would be over in just a few clicks. Who cares if later investigation proves the cybertrial wrong, not a single news source would spend a word to clean up “the rapist’s” reputation.
This kind of scenario is without a doubt rare, and I would be the last person to claim that the story of the original op-ed is false. But just as speculation should not be used in one direction, it should not be used in the other either. We must make sure that we know where our realm of action terminates and that we can maintain an objective perspective to facilitate professional resolution, waiting for conclusive results rather than jumping the gun.
We are at a point at which we have to defend ourselves from ourselves, because we should fear the damage that we could be capable of causing by jumping to conclusions that have not been verified. We must use that energy to instead look after one another and preempt anything like the op-ed’s story from happening again. We did our part, which was to amplify a cry for help and have the authorities give the matter the proper attention. Now let’s take a much needed step back and give a chance to those in the administration willing to help us to do so. We can and should remain interested and follow the developments of the story – stepping in again if need be – but we must also make sure that we are not giving birth to our own, dangerous story.