Kalamazoo College Republicans need to engage the campus differently

By Darrin Camilleri, Contributor

Last Wednesday’s event featuring the College Republicans’ speaker, author Jason Mattera, was a low point for political discourse on this campus. The tone with which he spoke was not only disrespectful, but highly toxic and inflammatory. The name-calling and derogatory comments did not help further political discussion in any way.

I will be the first to admit, I lost my cool during the discussion–and I wasn’t the only one. In a question and answer session, Mr. Mattera blatantly attempted to offend and belittle students in response to their questions rather than actually answer them in a reasonable way. His message was lost in a dark cloud of disrespectful, misogynistic comments, and after he made the third or fourth reference to men with tampons, I had had enough. I walked out.

The College Democrats’ intention was not to offend Mr. Mattera; we simply wanted people to hear our message and recognize that we support President Obama for more reasons than Mattera claims. I recognize that the dramatic way of portraying our message may have seemed provocative, but we were peaceful, and the only initial confrontation came when he opened the floor for questions. Our questions were reasonable, and his answers were mostly direct attacks on the questioners.

What did that do to help our political discourse on campus, College Republicans? Did your speaker’s combative, aggressive tone convert any students to your conservative cause? Or, even inspire them rethink their own political ideology? The answer, quite frankly, is no. Contrary to their intentions, an inflammatory and disrespectful speaker is not the best way to incite political debate on this campus; a knowledgeable conservative would have done so. The reaction to his speech has been overwhelmingly negative, and has even motivated liberals to work harder for the re-election of President Obama. That being said, the College Republicans could have avoided this entire controversy if they would have done what most of our generation do for information: Googled him.

Because of the offensive language that Mr. Mattera used in attempting to belittle people of this community, I call on the Kalamazoo College Republicans to own the monstrosity that they brought to campus. Not only do they need to own the event, but they need to publicly apologize to the Kalamazoo College community. We are a community of scholars who wish to engage in good debate, but what was on display Wednesday night was nothing of the sort.

Once you apologize, College Republicans, I challenge you to engage this campus in political dialogue that is beneficial to our minds, not discussion that simply attempts to insult them. I would welcome an environment where we can discuss political differences in an open forum without fear of scorn. We need more of that on our campus and in our world. Last Wednesday was the lowest point of political discourse that this campus has seen in a while. I hope that we can now enter an era at Kalamazoo College when our differences in political ideology can be out in the open and discussed respectfully. This is more than College Democrats versus College Republicans. If anything, our level of respect for one another can not get any lower than what happened last week. We have the power to change that and create a positive political environment, so let’s do something about it.

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