Breaking a different kind of silence

Once upon a time, I would have been appalled at this obscene intrusion into student privacy. But strangely, the sex-talk campaign just seemed painfully earnest, even naive. This was hard to explain at first. There is, to be sure, a real dearth of “openness” on campus, and thus a real status quo that the LeTS campaign seeks to address. It may simply be that Princeton is more conservative than its peers are; students’ unwillingness to engage in “dialogue” about sex, even as they embrace the “hookup culture” in practice, might simply be rooted in a vestigial cultural anxiety that will soon be cast off.

The problem with this notion, I think, is that it overlooks something important: Our silence goes well beyond sexual matters, and it serves a useful function. It is a product, not of our cultural backwardness, but of our sophistication. Whether fully conscious of it or not, Princeton students have displayed a masterful grasp of the uses and perils of language, and have an acute appreciation of the value of saying nothing, whether with words or without them.

Our silence, in short, is a wholly (and coldly) rational one. Certain realities — exclusive eating clubs and the accompanying social hierarchy, ruthless competition, the use of family connections (that is, socioeconomic advantages) to obtain jobs — are reinforced by not being publicly acknowledged. Eating club admissions, it is said, are about “compatibility,” not status; the unscrupulous job search, meanwhile, is carried on quietly, or at best justified by pointing out that “everyone else does it.” I suspect that the lack of “dialogue” on sex has something to do with this. As with the eating club system, there are certain aspects of Princeton’s sexual culture — Princeton men’s proclivity for freshmen comes to mind — that would cause qualms if discussed too openly.

In a (small-L) liberal society, it is hard to come up with a coherent justification for some of these practices. The solution is simple: Don’t talk about them. It is the classic case (at least to this suburban Washington, D.C., resident) of the good progressive parent quietly paying more than $1,000 for his son’s SAT prep course. It is often said that Princeton students are unusually mature; but it is worth remembering the less savory aspects of the adulthood we are growing into.

Our silence is not simply a matter of hypocrisy. It also seems, at times, to be a matter of survival. No one would publicly describe depression as a sign of innate weakness or a cause for contempt, but Princeton students’ apparent lack of openness about their afflictions, as documented in the ‘Prince’ article about mental health, suggests that they don’t place much faith in this. Most of us, it seems, subtly appreciate that the things that occur beneath the surface — the harsh judgments, the status distinctions — are what count.

Efforts to create a more tolerant, “progressive” campus have, ironically, often been simply subsumed into this trend. The political correctness movement, with its fixation on language, squares perfectly with our fixation on maintaining a squeaky-clean surface. If all it takes to escape condemnation is to say the right words, to mouth the right pieties, then we’re happy to oblige. The recent anti-“R-word” poster campaign struck me as a perfect, if inadvertent, encapsulation of this. Like the once-neutral word “cripple,” the word “retard” has over time taken on a negative connotation because of an underlying attitude toward the people it refers to. We can change the words all we want, but I fear that it will only be in the service of providing an inoffensive gloss to the same underlying beliefs.

I doubt that a genuine transformation of campus culture is likely to occur anytime soon. The driving force, the basic rationale behind our silence is far too potent. But in the midst of so much misdirection, misdirection in which I happily participate (everyone else does it), I have found some respite in the ‘Prince’ comments board and in the pages of the Nassau Weekly. Everything — high school sniping, snobbery, deviance — is brought into the open, and I get a fleeting sense that I am listening to the voice of Princeton’s id. What can I say? On some days, I even miss juicycampus.com.

Andrew Saraf is a sophomore from Chevy Chase, Md. He can be reached at asaraf@princeton.edu.