Letter to the Editor

My guess is that the intersection between the people who read this blog and those who read the Williams Record is close to empty, so I'm going to put my letter to the editor here so that nobody will miss out. I am not sure why they didn't put it online, but they didn't. So, here it is.

Last weekend at the Winter Carnival opening ceremonies, the women's alpine ski team put on a skit that was completely inappropriate. While the first part of the skit was funny in an acceptable way, it ended with a derogatory reference that specifically targeted, to the point of ridicule, an individual Williams student, in front of the hundreds of people assembled at Goodrich. This was done in such a way that all of the Williams students, but none of their families, the skiers from other schools, or college staff (such as Morty and Scott Lewis, who were there) would know what they were talking about, so the team ran no risk of being held responsible for their actions. Some might call this clever; I would call it deplorable.

What is more, when I confronted one of the captains about this, she was unapologetic, refusing to even consider the possibility that their skit had crossed the line. She actually tried to justify the skit by saying that one could interpret it as endorsing the choices of the targeted student. Luckily, the student did not happen to be there that evening, but this fact does not change the severity of what the ski team did. The responsibility rests mostly with the two captains, who acted out the offensive part of the skit, but the rest of the women’s alpine ski team is also responsible, because not one of them was brave enough to step forward and point out that their skit was in poor taste.

I was shocked at the insensitivity displayed by the women's alpine ski team, and shocked that the Williams students in the audience would laugh at the joke and clap for their skit. Williams, we know better than this. You wouldn't want to be individually humiliated in front of hundreds of people, so please, don't laugh when the ski team does it to someone else. It's really not that funny.

I wrote this letter in such a way that you will only know what it is about if you know what it is about. I am kind of good at that. I am kind of infamous with Rebecca for doing that. But look, here it came in handy! And I will not answer any questions about what it is about. If you don't know, I'm glad. Let's keep it that way.

So now you know that college has not disintegrated my moral fiber. And you know that I don't like stupid horrible people who do stupid horrible things.