Letters to the Editors: January 14th 2016
To the Editor,Congratulations to the new board of The Exonian!I write to applaud the [addition] of an Editorial and a Letters section of The Exonian [Editorial: The First Writes of the 138th Board]. This section not only, as you say, addresses an absence as compared to other papers of record; it also creates an important forum for community conversations about events on campus and beyond. I especially am grateful for your commitment to fostering respectful, thoughtful and thought-provoking, dialogue.At a time when the media has become increasingly dominated by speed, heat and anonymity, The Exonian and its readers have an opportunity to model a community discussion in a way that reflects our values: many voices, more diversity of views, more collaborative intelligence, more self-reflection, an attention to accuracy and a responsibility to fairness.These are the values of our Harkness classrooms. We aspire to live them out both in our individual daily interactions, and in our collective community. May The Exonian’s new initiative serve that end, in the pages of the paper and across our campus.Thank you, and here’s to The Exonian!—Lisa MacFarlane, Principal
To the Editor,I would like to follow up on an article published last February voicing the concerns of several Exonians about how our school handles sexual assault cases, especially after the very public case at St. Paul’s School [Deans and Students Discuss the Campus Sexual Assault Policy]. I found it intriguing that only female students were quoted in this article, and not knowing who else was interviewed, this pushes me to request the writers to also interview boys about these issues. They are also a part of the conversation.Yet now, a whole year later, I am just starting to see positive, student-led conversation about these topics being encouraged. One example is the conversation dinner hosted by H4, the peer health education group on campus, about sex and sex culture at Exeter.Having attended and, in part, led this dinner, I found the necessity in pushing students of different genders to talk to each other truthfully about how they viewed these issues on our campus and in their lives. It is one of the most impactful and sincere ways to move our community forward regarding issues of assault, which was one of the larger issues of the evening. When addressing this topic, the “no grinding” rule that was put in place last year came up. A faculty member at our table asked me what the problem was with addressing the problem of assault with rules. My response was this. The entitlement of a boy (most often) to grind with a girl (again, most often) is only a symptom of a greater culture that is fostered at Exeter, as well as outside our bubble. The issue with only regulating this specific symptom, rooted in a sex culture based on entitlement, is that it breaks grinding apart from other, graver, consequences of the culture, therefore creating a false impression that Exeter does not have a problem with assault or that it’s been “fixed.”But assault and rape culture has its degrees, starting with a sense of male entitlement and inherent power over women, manifesting itself in classrooms and beyond, and ends in rape and even murder. The Academy as a whole needs to address these issues not as individual events, but as a greater problem because that is exactly what it is. Grinding and rape fall under the same umbrella and as messy and unpleasant as it may be, acknowledging this is the first step to creating a safer school.—Claire Dauge-Roth, Student ’17