The Gentle Punishment of V's and All-Gender Housing
Our administration’s recent announcement of an all-gender housing option for the coming school year has been met with little opposition from the Exeter student body and faculty. An article published in The Exonian last week cited not a single dissenting opinion on the question of whether Exeter should establish an all gender housing option at all. Many conservative voices on this campus often complain about the suppression of their opinions in Exeter’s liberal echo chamber. However, the lack of vocal opposition to the creation of all-gender housing is not a case of liberals suppressing unpopular beliefs; it instead illustrates the overwhelming sentiment among our student body regarding the issue of all gender housing, which is apathy.
On the surface, the creation of an all-gender housing option is a difficult decision with which to disagree. The advantages of such a change are plainly evident. The new housing provides a place for non-binary students to feel more comfortable in their living situation, and has the potential to attract more applicants who, in the past, may have been turned away from Exeter at the thought of single-gender housing. For the clear majority of the Exeter community, the benefits of this measure, which will serve up to forty students (the number who expressed interest in the housing alternative last fall), will come at the small price of displacing around a dozen students who previously lived in Williams and Kirtland House.
The deans’ recently drafted visitations policy, on the other hand, was met with fierce opposition from students and faculty alike. This rejection was apparently due to the inconvenience the reform would cause both groups. The argument against all-gender housing is as plainly evident as the contradiction between it and the visitations policy draft. Through all-gender housing, the administration is promoting increased freedom and comfort in human interactions for a small minority of students, while the visitations policy draft decreases this freedom and comfort across the board. This is a logical argument, but not one many people are making.
I expressed both popular opinions—passive support for the housing measure, disgust at the visitations proposal—to my advising group last Wednesday, both of which were met by the agreement of my peers as well as my advisor. However, after reevaluating both proposals through the lens of a discussion my US history class recently had on the theories of Michael Foucault, an influential twentieth-century historian and philosopher, it is clear to me that both proposals share the same grave implications for our community.
In the passage my history class read from Foucault’s Discipline and Punish, the author presents “the gentle way of punishment” as the predominant method by which one group subtly exerts power over another in the postmodern world. Daniel T. Rodgers, whose Age of Fracture grapples with the influence of Foucault’s thought, described this “practice of power” as “the constant supervisory ‘gaze’ under which the new human subjects [are] disciplined” into becoming “reengineered” and “docile” individuals.
Both the visitations policy draft and the all-gender housing reform echo this theory of subtle power. Under the proposed visitations policy (or any future draft like it), Exeter students, or “the new human subjects” would come under “the constant supervisory ‘gaze’” of faculty members as they seek private moments to bond with those around them. In addition to this, the use of the word ‘heteronormative’ and the emphasis on sexual assault “reengineer” us to think of all interactions between students behind closed doors—whether sexual in nature, or not—as possible crimes and Boston Globe investigations. In the vast majority of instances, these interactions are important times for high school students to learn how to navigate and strengthen relationships. The lack of dissent on the matter of all-gender housing shows that we are a community that has slowly been disciplined not to consider the larger implications of serious changes made in the name of tolerance.
The concerns of Exonians who do not conform to either the norm of heterosexuality or the gender binary need to be addressed by our community, but not in a way that is disproportionate to the small fraction of the student body that they represent. We must not allow ourselves to accept the all-gender housing proposal simply because it is not inconvenient for most of us. And we must not allow ourselves to reject the visitations policy draft simply because it is. Changes like these are evidence of a larger trend of politically correct and progressive thought gently punishing the community with its pessimistic view of human nature. The all-gender housing reform may seem logical, and the intentions behind the new draft of the visitations policy good, but because of these reforms, we are all becoming more “docile” and “disciplined” individuals who will, unless we are more self-aware, fail to provide important checks and balances to a group of people whose subtle power will reshape Exeter in the future.