FLAMBOYANCE is fun. It makes for entertaining movies, music and mentalities. However, flamboyance seldom aids good policy or good journalism. Student governance, in its recent efforts to educate its constituents, has abstained from flamboyance. It hasn't asked people who behave rudely whether they were raised in a barn. It hasn't equated ignorance of the costs of such behavior with stupidity. Unfortunately, student journalism hasn't returned the favor.
Columnists for The Cavalier Daily repeatedly have declared Student Council's attempts to inform the University about the "not gay" chant to be worthless, counterproductive, and even an impingement on First Amendment rights. Judging by what they wrote, very few of these journalists have bothered to engage members of Council in a conversation about the "Good Ol' Song." Instead, they do the fun, easy, flamboyant thing by saying that our representatives are wrong or stupid. As much as I enjoy calling elected officials names, particularly in my capacity as an Opinion columnist, I would recommend a little more restraint from those judging Council's work on this issue.
Journalists need to get the facts right. For future reference, the ad hoc committee working to end the chant is the Good Ol' Song Committee - short and sweet. Its strategy paper was three pages long and included detailed ways to pursue the overall tactic of "talking up" the issue. Council President Abby Fifer was asked specifically to introduce the "Good Ol' Song" to first-year students at Convocation, which may have been why the song was the only topic she addressed.
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Writers for University publications should be careful in their use of tradition-heavy phrases like "student self-governance." Student self-governance does not mean that every student should do whatever she wants, without guidelines or consequences. That would be anarchy. Rather, self-governance allows the student community to play a major role in creating and maintaining its rules and disciplinary mechanisms. Thus the honor system does not merely ask each student to act honorably and leave it at that. That's an honor request, not a system. The Honor Committee works to define and enforce the honor code. While the Board of Visitors sets the Standards of Conduct, the student-run Judiciary Committee investigates and adjudicates violations of those rules.
Similarly, Council serves as the student body's voice to the administration and as a facilitator of activities. Its constitution describes its purpose: "to further the best interests of the Students of the University ... through promotion of improved community conditions." This sounds a little like the Preamble to the United States Constitution. In that document, the writers deemed the government to have a role in "promot[ing] the general welfare." The U.S. government does this partly through education.
One might regard the Good Ol' Song Committee's efforts to spread the word about the negative effects of the "not gay" chant as comparable to the Surgeon General's warnings on alcohol and tobacco products. Obviously Council cannot prohibit the chant, any more than the government could ban alcohol effectively. Just as smoking and drinking are bad for the individual's health, chanting "not gay" adversely affects the University's health as a tolerant community.
By placing the warnings, the government does not say that its people are stupid or incapable of making their own decisions, thus avoiding a condescending and paternalistic approach doomed to failure. Instead, it offers them information so they can make better-informed choices. The column "Sensitivity to gays in song," written by members of the Good Ol' Song Committee for The Cavalier Daily's summer mail-out, did not demand that all students stop chanting "not gay." Instead, it urged them to think hard about their actions and to share their thoughts with others.
On another note, I was happy to see the Sept. 4 Cavalier Daily article, "'Not gay' chant loses ground at game," about the fading of the chant at the first home football game of the season. Hopefully this trend will continue at the Homecoming game, when many LGBT alumni from the Serpentine Society plan to visit. The Committee's education efforts appear to be paying off. Evidently some people opt to make their statement about the University community with polite silence, not misdirected flamboyance.
(Pallavi Guniganti's column appears Thursdays in The Cavalier Daily. She can be reached at pguniganti@cavalierdaily.com.)
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