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Sidebar:
A Wellesley Student
Responds
March
8, 2001
These
comments from a conservative student at Wellesley appear to reinforce
the belief that the President was adroit in shifting the attention
away from the administration.
I
had heard a lot on campus about the Rolling Stone
article and the way it had portrayed Wellesley women. In fact,
that was all I heard
about for awhile. It seemed everyone was angry about it. But when
friends asked if I had read it, “In my free time!” was my response.
Between studying for midterms and attending meetings, I simply
had too much else to do
Then
I did finally sit down to read it and I became pretty angry too,
and very frustrated. Because, for all of the work that the women
at Wellesley were doing in so many different areas, here we were
being characterized not for our achievements but for our “erotic
sex lives.” I think the most amusing and accurate response I heard
came in the middle of a midterm study session one evening when
my friend picked her head up from a difficult problem set and
said, “Where are these erotic sex lives that they talk about?
Sign me up!”
The
truth is that while the events portrayed in the article do exist,
they are on such a small scale compared to the work that is done
as to make the charges laughable and transparent in their intent.
We may party hard, but not nearly as hard as at other schools.
In fact Wellesley has one of the lowest alcohol presence levels
of any college. Somehow that did not quite make it to print. As
for man-hating lesbians holding weekly nudist parties and threesomes
with professors? Nice try but no cigar.
What
fully demonstrated the slant of the article was that it began
by discussing the one male who is staying at Wellesley for the
year through the twelve-college exchange. The intrepid Rolling
Stone reporter should have done a little investigating. Not only
has this guy been trying to grind his dull ax from the day he
arrived; not only did he prevaricate, to put it politely; but
he has once again upheld his reputation as one of the most obtuse
people on the campus. If he is not flailing about insulting the
college or the women here, he is insulting the women at his own
college, all-the-while invariably never failing to mention (this
my personal favorite) that he is a “model.”
But
this is not really his fault; it is Wellesley’s fault. The administration
has let the goggles of political correctness blur their standards
and criteria for admission. Somehow I suspect that they were snookered
by the “male model” angle. Male or female, the question of intelligence
and character ought to come first. As a result, students who have
earned their way in must suffer the momentary sting of malcontents
who have found their way to fifteen minutes of fame through slander.
Yes
there are parties at Wellesley, no doubt they are sometimes wild.
But this goes on at other colleges as well and often on a much
greater scale. Perhaps now there will be tighter security at parties
and, for awhile, slightly nervous professors and campus police.
Hopefully Wellesley has learned its lesson and will sacrifice
a bit of liberal enthusiasm for some common sense.
None
of this, however, (and here’s the rub for the runway gang) takes
away from the fact that the women of Wellesley College work very
hard and that a very high proportion of them will be the next
leaders of society. I can’t conceive of anything that can take
this away from us. Certainly not an amateur writer whose girlfriend
didn’t like her Wellesley experience, and certainly not a visiting
model.
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