What would you do?
MY HONORS FRESHMEN WATCHED "The Killing Fields" (1984) as part of their required first year course, and then made to consider what they would have done as Western journalists and functionaries trapped in a hotel as their Cambodian colleagues were singled out by the Khmer Rouge for punishment and likely execution. We also read MLK and Rigoberta Menchu and in an unrelated exercise, Abbie Hoffman was an event speaker. The course outline was a mess, created by committee, but it asked young people very hard moral questions and put them on the spot time and again. As a nation we were out of Vietnam but were knee-deep in El Salvador's civil war. Small resettlements of Southeast Asians had begun to arrive and fleeing Salvadorans, too. My son Nick was born in 1985. A bit later the first Montagnard war refugees began arriving in Greensboro.
MY HONORS FRESHMEN WATCHED "The Killing Fields" (1984) as part of their required first year course, and then made to consider what they would have done as Western journalists and functionaries trapped in a hotel as their Cambodian colleagues were singled out by the Khmer Rouge for punishment and likely execution. We also read MLK and Rigoberta Menchu and in an unrelated exercise, Abbie Hoffman was an event speaker. The course outline was a mess, created by committee, but it asked young people very hard moral questions and put them on the spot time and again. As a nation we were out of Vietnam but were knee-deep in El Salvador's civil war. Small resettlements of Southeast Asians had begun to arrive and fleeing Salvadorans, too. My son Nick was born in 1985. A bit later the first Montagnard war refugees began arriving in Greensboro.
None of my smart freshmen could figure out what they could do (they were working in small teams, which could explain some of it) but I'm glad the era supported that kind of provocation. "Question Authority" bumper stickers on faculty cars were very popular. I don't have to emphasize how times have changed since then. On the very liberal campus at which I taught race issues were generally avoided, probably because so few minorities were present. Under such circumstances the perception arose that students of color were privileged to come on to campus, granted access by whites who’d otherwise had the right to deny them space or place. The color line continues to be the problem, now of the 21st century. Because much of higher ed went through a long slumber it has left many unable or uneasy to confront moral questions to the point where one young Latinx youth, an outstanding recent graduate, was at pains to say that discomforting situations were for him the times when he had learned the most. Today's youth have impressive language and analytic skills about the state of society that outpace their elders. I feel like if I put the same dilemma before them, they'd know what to do.
