The college planned to raise the flag to its full height two
days later, on Veterans Day. After
someone or some group took down the flag without permission on the night of
Nov. 9 and burned it, the college’s board of trustees decided it would be nice to remove the flag altogether from public display on campus.
Then the president of the college, Jonathan Lash, called for
an open-ended dialogue on how the flag symbolizes different things, some of
them quite horrible, to different people.
Some Hampshire students, he noted, “grew up victims of racism and
injustice” and are troubled by the flag because it is a “symbol of a system
that has been repressive.”
That decision created a controversy that quickly spread beyond
the college’s idyllic setting in the Pioneer Valley. Veterans groups around the country were
particularly outraged. Lash and his college got mauled in the media and on the
Internet. The president's appetite for dialogue seemed to diminish daily.
This past Friday, Dec. 2, he announced his decision to put
the flag up again at Hampshire.
“…we were getting so many graphic, threatening calls and
emails,” said Lash, “that I just felt it was safer to put the flag back up --
which we’d always intended to do at some point – and continue the discussion
with it up.”
When the controversy was at a fever pitch, Lash took pains
to point out that, for him personally, the American flag “is a symbol of the
highest aspirations of our country, the things that I believe in that our
country hopes to provide, in terms of liberty and opportunity and justice.”
But, but, he emphasized that he was “simultaneously
profoundly aware of the differences in perception for marginalized communities
who, as one student said to me, wake up every morning afraid, and who felt
deeply and personally threatened by the toxic rhetoric, the racist rhetoric and
Islamophobic statements during the (presidential) campaign.”
So, Lash was for taking down the flag and having a dialogue
until that course of action became just too much trouble. He loves the flag as a symbol of the highest
aspirations of our country but does not believe enough in that symbolism to
withstand the disapproval of anyone enjoying a high-priced Hampshire
education while residing in one of the most liberal, most welcoming communities
in the country, if not the whole world.
If he’d consulted Stan Rosenberg, the president of the
Massachusetts Senate who lives in Amherst, Lash might have saved himself a lot
of anguish, not to mention bad publicity and ill will throughout America. Referring to the flag controversy, Rosenberg
told the State House News Service on Nov. 28, “It’s really disappointing to see
what’s happened out there.” He added
that he would “like to see the flag go back up as soon as possible.”
When the flag was torn down and burned on his campus, President
Lash was at a crossroads, a place where he could have written his own little
chapter in American history. He could
have called a morning-after press conference, held up a photo of the burned American flag,
and declared:
“I am ordering that a new and larger flag be raised to the
top of the pole at noon today, where it will remain as long as I am president of
Hampshire College. The flag that flies
at our college symbolizes the highest and best aspirations of our nation. End of story.
Everyone should return immediately to the business of getting the best education
they can during the precious little time they have at Hampshire College. Thank you.”
Instead, Lash took what he thought was a safe choice, the middle
ground, which has been the wide territory of mediocrity since time immemorial,
the place one goes to get his ticket to oblivion punched.
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