In Defense of Dissent

By Elizabeth Derby

There it was: 9AM, MWF, second semester senior year. I’d been seven terms an English major without one foray into Shakespeare, so tragedy felt fitting as I made the course selection.

After a few months’ study with a professor of self-proclaimed rigor, I was in full-blown, literary-geek love. The course sought our scrutiny, meanings drawn from a personal as well as academic context. We turned language around and inside out, shaking intent from sonnets like small stones from shoes. Is Hamlet’s oath of justice a trigger for certain condemnation? Does heroism hasten death?

Despite my minor obsession with the course, one early spring morning I found it hard to concentrate. The classroom was breezy and flooded with sunlight; transparent green leaves rustled at the windowpane. Our professor strode in, patched blazer flapping against the weathered tome at his side. He went practically unnoticed until he dropped the volume with a bang on the podium.

I shot my attention to the front. His back was ramrod straight, his blue eyes blazing. God. I hoped he wasn’t handing back essays. When he spoke, his voice tinged with a sneer of disbelief.

“I don’t want to belabor the point,” he began. “But I really don’t understand you people. When I was in college, we had Vietnam. Protests, rallies, thousand-person marches. They had to call the National Guard on us. We exercised our rights to the highest degree, pushing free speech and assembly and everything else to fight for what we believed in. Our access to media was so skewed back then—no accurate news, doctored broadcasts. And we still fought like hell.

“Now you’ve got a whole War on Terror to protest—trillions of dollars and thousands of lives in the pit, and you’ve got access to all the information in the world.” He set his jaw. “Yet all you people see fit to protest is a cross.” A dangerous pause. “I’d love if one of you could explain why you’ve decided to waste your energy on this. Why you can’t work up that youthful passion about something that matters.”

The classroom was silent. We were in shock, I think. Someone offered a comment on political correctness, and the conversation was dead in the water. Talk turned to essay topics, a slap-on-the-wrist pop quiz. Academia moved on.

It’s been a year since my professor asked the question, since controversy moved like a silent breeze inside that sunny classroom. At the time the whole issue felt unimportant. But if a course in tragedy taught me anything, it’s that our most important battles are often hidden, framed by contexts so deeply personal we cannot see beyond them. Conclusions rise like houselights once the curtain falls, but not until the tragic hero has made his final exit.

Gene Nichol is an intimidating figure. When I first saw him walking up Jamestown Road, I was a hundred yards away and grateful. Then I worked up the nerve to shout and raise an arm in greeting, and his smile was more awesome than his bearing. Physically, he is the ideal figurehead for an ancient institution of higher learning—regal, powerful, larger-than-life—and his presence is mere prelude to his oratory. Wrought with certainty, pitch-perfect to the last, his speeches have moved me to tears.

But language, like appearance, is faulty measure of a man. Words are slippery, symbols of a greater picture, and their reading requires compassion and care. Critics are fond of eviscerating dialogue; they find fault in phrases and cite them as representations of intent. Human spirit, however, cannot be reduced to the rubble of a paragraph.

So if Nichol’s leadership will not be summarized by his bearing or his words, how should students of this turbulent period at William and Mary derive meaning from his resignation? How should they understand its stakes and repercussions?

My professor would be adamant. “Context,” he’d say, slamming his fist on the table. “Look beyond what’s right in front of you. Every character is part of a bigger picture, and it’s your job to be intelligent and careful enough to see it.”

Nichol came at the bequest of students and administration to guide the College into her future. He came ready to move mountains, and his Gateway program helped roll aside boulders of financial burden and social stigma to welcome a wider world to William and Mary than she had ever known. The brick-wall blinders of our small, affluent, Southern College were suddenly cast in sharp focus.

A mark of homogeneity is the absence of conflict, the positive feedback cycle of uniform opinion. But Nichol promoted education that encompasses a more complete universe, one with a niche for every inclination. Given a platform for every voice, each student a distinct opportunity to speak, conflict was inevitable. Nichol recognized that increased diversity demands a corresponding leap of faith: trust in students to learn from each other, give each one their voice without qualification. Theirs will be the wisdom of honest judgment, the education of empowered thought.

Above all, Nichol honored students. He respected a multitude by giving everyone a forum to speak out. Student argument abounded; we took issue with his decisions, swallowed pills of compromise, began true philosophical debate with our peers. When Nichol refused to champion a single belief above others, he refused to let anyone—administration, taxpayers, wealthy alumni—shut out even the smallest corner of the current student body. One man dangled a $12 million carrot to coax Nichol into support of just one traditional belief, to disrespect the needs of just one dissident opinion. Nichol refused. By doing so he gave students voices, proof positive of their merit, our strength, our worthiness of honor.

“Why are you so worked up over a cross?” my professor asked. Because our eyes our open and our minds are challenged, our hearts on fire for the first time in four hundred years. Minority opinion is inescapable; a majority no longer holds the floor. Suddenly, miraculously, our microcosm was not one but thousands of clamoring voices. Let me watch an art show about sex. Let me protest a sex show that claims art. Let me claim maltreatment in anonymity. Let me claim my fear of mistreatment by Anonymous. Let me divulge my shame without judgment. Trust my honesty, trust my integrity, trust me.

Now Nichol is gone, and the battle rages more fiercely than ever. This is our war—our Vietnam, our abstract noun to rail against. Give us our voices. Give us hope for change. The world exists not as it could be, but merely as it has been, and the future is undecided. We pick our battles, and wage our wars, according to that profound faith which experience or, if we’re extraordinarily lucky, education has instilled in us. We pick our places, and when lines are drawn, we choose our sides. That is our prerogative and our greatest blessing. Challenge is certain, failures inevitable, but to live our lives now, with honor and mutual respect, would be the greatest lesson of our lives.