2024-05-03 10:55

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Neue Begründung:

The College has a moral obligation to its alumni, faculty, staff, and supporters to be transparent and forthcoming with important issues like these. The College has long held that the pursuit of truth is one of the highest ideals to which humanity can aspire. The Program emphasizes this at every turn: from the shades in Plato’s cave, to Galileo’s heliocentric universe, to the very method that Johnnies have used for decades to find truth in the original texts. Allowing misinformation to be spread unchallenged is a threat to that truth. It is a practice that causes us to question the College’s public commitment to its students, alums, faculty, staff, and affiliates. affiliates. 

Even without an appeal to truth for its own sake, misinformation endangers the students under the College’s purview and creates discord among the College’s vast and interconnected alumni network. We are seeing that even now as word about the Title IX case is spreading in the community. The best way for St. John’s to minimize this harm is to make a public statement. statement. 

We have seen time and time again in very public fora in this country, as well as in our small community, that sexual abuse survivors and reporters are possible subject to all manner of threats to their safety, well-being, and mental health. The same is true of any abuse survivor or reporter who challenges someone in a powerful position, whether it be a movie studio head or a tenured professor. In a relatively close-knit community such as St. John's College, where everyone shares a connection of some kind, the risk is even higher for someone who speaks out in a situation where the truth is not public record. We want changes in both official college policy as well as within our culture on campus to lower the risks and costs to reporters who choose to come forward. Keeping those risks and costs high protects the people that make our campus unsafe and corrodes the integrity of this institution that we believe in so much.

It may remain an open question whether virtue may be taught, but it can certainly be modeled. It is time for the College to model to students, alumni, faculty, staff, and donors the correct course of action in this regard, and to make a public statement disavowing sexual misconduct, and correcting the record on Kalkavage’s departure. departure. 

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