Forbearance and Respect

Connections: Spring 2007 -- Westchester’s John Jay High School became the focus of controversy in March when their Principal asked three female juniors, auditioning for an open mike session at the school, not to use the word “vagina” in their reading of the monologue “My Short Skirt” from Eve Ensler’s play, “The Vagina Monologues.” The girls did so in their performance anyway, received an in-school suspension for insubordination, and arguments over free speech for students in public schools began. The story spread internationally, ranging from a segment on NBC’s Today Show to countless newspapers (including our local Journal News) and the blogosphere. Those interested in the arguments that raged back and forth can read them on the web, if they didn’t already experience them over their dinner tables. My purpose now is not to take a position on the matter – you will not find in this brief essay an explanation of what Hackley would have done, or what I think John Jay’s students or Principal should have done. Many writers have given you their two cents on that. I want instead to reflect on why this became such a celebrated story, and how we approach such inevitable disagreements.

First of all, the web is an extraordinary thing. Within seconds one can find the entirety of “My Short Skirt” (a better poem than one would think from newspaper accounts), see a video of the three girls reading the poem (they do so more affectingly than one would expect from newspaper accounts), and a letter from the John Jay Principal (who writes with clarity and thoughtfulness, despite the characterizations of him in newspaper accounts). One can also find blog entries on the matter originating from Switzerland to California, in which writers passionately abuse those who disagree with them.

There seems to me to be merit and substance on both sides of the disagreement. Anyone who has been a high school student has to sympathize with these girls, and any parent of teenagers able to extrapolate from the experience of managing his or her own children to managing hundreds of them in a high school has to sympathize with the principal. I don’t believe these girls were fomenting revolution, nor do I believe their Principal was engaged in repression of free thought. I don’t propose to sort out the competing merits of their positions; I don’t know all the facts and circumstances. What strikes me is how rare the willingness to admit merit and substance on the other side seems to have been.

With due respect to these girls and to their Principal, this was not a situation in which life and freedom were deeply at stake. This was, frankly, a garden-variety issue in a local high school. To gain a sense of proportion, one can visit the web site of Human Rights Watch (http://hrw.org/) and learn about issues of free speech in Egypt or China or of women’s rights in Darfur or Iran. One can also reflect on the experience of retired Hackley teacher Pavel Litvinov, who was exiled for five years in Siberia as a consequence of his protesting the USSR’s invasion of Czechoslovakia. These are situations in which life and freedom are deeply at stake. That comparison, however, does not mean that there is not merit and substance to the John Jay issues, only that a sense of proportion seemed to me to have been missing from the language of many associated with the matter.

Was it the involvement of the media that inflamed and kept those who disagreed with each other from acknowledging the merits of the other side? Or was it somehow comforting to be passionately angry about an issue in which life and freedom were not at stake? We habitually blame the media for failing to emphasize substantive international and domestic issues in their coverage, but those in media remind us that they provide what we wish to watch and read. Is our passion about censorship versus discipline at John Jay High School a distraction from or a displacement of the emotions associated with more serious matters that we fear are intractable?

Hackley School’s statement of philosophy includes the following sentence:

“Hackley students are expected to go beyond mere observance of the rules and to strive to make Hackley a civilized community where courtesy, kindness, and forbearance reign, and incivility and intolerance are shunned.”

“Forbearance” is an unfashionable word. Its fellows are “restraint” and “patience,” and it is founded in “respect.” We seem instead to live in a world in which “passion,” “indignation,” “intensity,” and “action” reign, in which we are confident in our anger before we have learned all the facts, and assume the worst of those who differ with our opinions, before we have considered their points of view. This is not simply a matter of aesthetics, of preferring the energy and style of advocacy over the grey temporizing of reason. This is a matter of what qualities are necessary to make and keep a civilized community, which each generation must create anew.

On March 19th, under the auspices of the Henry Wendt Visiting Scholar program and the Allstrom Chair in Foreign Affairs, Hackley’s Upper School devoted the day to a symposium on the Middle East and North Korea with three distinguished speakers — Nicholas Eberstadt, Gideon Rose, and Ambassador Dennis Ross. Many Hackley parents and alumni also participated as seminar leaders in discussions following the keynote presentations. Issues surrounding North Korea and the Middle East will affect the lives of all our children, and they most certainly are matters in which life and freedom are deeply at stake.

It was an extraordinary privilege for us to talk with scholars and diplomats who have brought all their energies of mind and heart to tasks requiring forbearance, restraint, patience, and respect in the service of civilization. We talk about such world-shaping issues in school, but our quotidian lives are more concerned with issues of the garden variety that afflicted John Jay High School. If we cannot learn to exercise forbearance and respect in such matters, we will not be educating our children to manage the issues of life and freedom that will shape their future.