Desecrating the lessons of an ideal education

By Deirdre Brill

The summer before my senior year in high school, I traveled with my parents to look at a number of East Coast schools. As we toured one of the most prestigious, my mother looked around at the other high-school tourgoers, who looked as clueless as I did, and asked a rhetorical question: "Are these the future leaders of our country?" My parents and I laughed as we thought about how funny it was that these same awkward high-school students might one day be the nation's movers and shakers.

Last semester, during a nighttime trip to CCL, I was forced to ask myself the same question. As I walked toward the library, I passed a group of men huddled around the Women's Table. One of them yelled, "What do you have?" The others began screaming repeatedly, "I have a penis!" After three and a half years of college, I was not particularly surprised by this obnoxious interchange, but I was surprised by what happened next. One of the men yelled, "Stick it in a vagina!" Then the others stood on top of the Women's Table and urinated on it.

The Women's Table is one of the only public spaces on campus that actively celebrates the presence of women at Yale. That these men used it to assert their power as men is both insulting and demeaning. They symbolically raped the Women's Table, asserting the powerlessness of every woman on this campus. Although I had no interaction with any of the participants, I felt personally threatened by their actions as I walked past. It was at this point that I asked myself, "Are these the future leaders of our country?" It had been four years since I heard my mother ask this same question, and it no longer made me laugh. Instead, it made me scared.

Two days after witnessing the display at the Women's Table, I attended a rally for tenure reform. The demonstrators were exhorting Yale to tenure more women and minorities. Currently, only 11 percent of Yale's tenured faculty is female—the lowest percentage in the Ivy League. A lot of the statements people made at the rally were striking, but one in particular reminded me of the scene I had witnessed two days before. A woman stood up and spoke. At the conclusion of her ideal education, she said, she would be less ignorant of the inherent advantages she had as a white, upper-middle-class member of society. In other words, she hoped to understand the structure of inequality that exists in the United States. An education that does not address that structure, or the other problems that exist here, does a disservice both to its students and to the people with whom its students will one day interact. By choosing to tenure professors with diverse backgrounds, however, Yale can offer the ideal education and give its graduating students a degree of understanding that is far superior to what we now receive.

By urinating on the Women's Table, the men demonstrated that they need a better education. It's frightening to think that Yale enables people—both men and women—who gain a sense of strength and power by marginalizing others not only to enter the real world but possibly to lead it. On a more immediate level, it upsets me to think that I take classes with and speak in front of these same few who go out at night to express my inferiority. I'm frustrated that any one of these men probably has a better chance than I do of getting tenure at Yale someday and shaping the minds of future generations. I'm even more scared that the women or other minorities with whom these men (and others like them) work, or teach, or even rule will never know what these men really think of them. Their actions clearly express the belief that any woman who seeks an education and attempts to take even a little of the power that education offers deserves to be covered in piss.

Deirdre Brill is a senior in Trumbull.

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