Op-Ed: Undo yourselves, Jumbos

Content warning: This article discusses mental health and sexual assault.

My name is Rena Oppenheimer and I graduated from Tufts in 2013. I often wondered about what I was doing there, what the point was, and never seemed to find it. I have begun to realize that many of the hard parts of my experience as a student are deeply connected to systems of oppression -- and that a lens to understand these systems was glaringly absent from my Tufts education.

I want to write this so that others feeling the same way, whether still at Tufts or beyond, can feel less alone and understand that you are not at fault. I am calling for the powers that be at Tufts to think deeply about what 'active citizenship' really means and what can be done to protect individuals from further harm as well as to bring communities together in solidarity and healing.

When I reflect on my time at Tufts, I certainly remember moments that were beautiful — friendships or professors or groups that made me feel connected and inspired. I recognize, too, that many others may not think about Tufts the way I do, but in my mind that campus is a landscape of loneliness. At Tufts, depression was a struggle more often than not. I balanced my courses and involvement in Institute for Global Leadership groups with treatment at an eating disorder center — which I lied to most friends about, saying I was taking a class at another school.

On the weekends, I used substances to numb myself out and saw others around me doing the same. Being at Tufts is a chapter in my life when I was raped and assaulted multiple times, and these experiences felt normal, par for the course. I didn’t see any difference between partying and enduring unsafety on a regular basis.

Tufts is a place where many white folks like myself go straight into a private liberal arts institution after high school, swaddled by the unquestioned assumptions that they are hardworking and deserving. My learning was not grounded in my positionality or role in the world — it was about picking apart the experiences and ideas of others. I sat in mostly anthropology classrooms with mostly white students and professors — according to the Tufts Admissions website, 72.9 percent of professors are white — and mostly studied resource-poor people of color. I critiqued my ass off for four years and wrote papers that had nothing to do with my soul. I remember a class I took where a student identified herself as a woman of color when she raised her hand, and I remember laughing about it with a white friend. I couldn’t understand why someone would bring race into the room like that. In retrospect, I can see that I had never really considered my own whiteness before. My laughter was a defense. Deep down, I knew how uncomfortable it made me to sit with my own privilege and complicity in the brokenness of our world.

Part of the reason that I held so much in was because I felt like there wasn’t enough room to be vulnerable at Tufts. In my experience, painful feelings were something to be ashamed of — I was supposed to be having fun. I blamed myself for feeling violated and less-than, for hating my body, for feeling a profound and pervasive hopelessness about the world, and for doubting the importance of what I was studying. This did not change until years after graduating, when I first encountered ideas about liberation: feminist theory, queer theory and critical race theory.

Of course, I would never suggest that Tufts is responsible for the creation of rape culture or binge drinking or unchecked white supremacy. I do feel strongly that Tufts has an institutional role in perpetuating systems of oppression and a beautiful, unmet potential in naming and disrupting them. According to its mission statement, Tufts is committed to providing “transformative experiences for students and faculty in an inclusive and collaborative environment.” There is a lot to transform on campus and a lot being excluded. I also see incredible possibility for people to challenge and question and dismantle and rebuild within themselves. I want to propose that Tufts include liberation-oriented learning as integral to its educational goals — for both students and faculty. This includes holding space for difficult conversations about our own identities, building up thick skins in order to have interactions that matter and lifting up the scholarship and leadership of marginalized voices. Most importantly, this means making damn well sure that nobody graduates or steps in front of a classroom without knowing about patriarchy, ableism, white supremacy, transphobia or other ways that oppression impacts all of us.

Perhaps engineering students at Tufts will develop a time machine that will allow me to find myself on the Tisch roof and put a bell hooks book in my hand. Until then, it is my sincere hope that Tufts will do some hard work to bring more aliveness and freedom to the student experience.