Just three years after Middlesex’s founding, a group of intrepid students formed a school newspaper as one of the school’s first (and only surviving) student organizations. Since its inception and throughout its existence, The Anvil has faced various challenges from breakaway newspapers to flagging student involvement. The paper, however, weathered those tests and today boasts high student involvement in writing and enjoys a large readership among faculty, parents, and alumni. However, The Anvil’s most pressing challenge at present is not to get students to write, but to get them to write interesting and engaging articles. At 120 years, The Anvil must now look to its past to guide its future course.
Over the past four years, my biggest qualm with The Anvil and biggest issue I hope to address as an editor is that we have plenty of smart, eloquent, and inquisitive writers and yet our Opinion section often feels strikingly bland. In the lead-up to a highly dramatic and important presidential election, only a few students have been brave enough to put forth their thoughts. Fewer still have overcome the reticence to take a firm stance (or a real stance at all) that has become characteristic of our opinion articles over the last few years. These evasive arguments don’t reflect a lack of skill or knowledge, but rather a general fear of expressing themselves forcefully on both the issues of the nation and even of the school itself.
The Anvil (along with extinct campus clubs like the Young Democrats and Young Republicans) seems to be a victim of general chilled political expression on campus. To be fair, I was not a Middlesex student five, ten, or twenty years ago—but diverse evidence, from the death of partisan clubs to faculty concerns about perceived or self-enforced suppression of speech on campus to an Anvil poll which found less than half of Middlesex students felt that others wouldn’t negatively judge them for their political beliefs, suggests that open political discussion and the free exchange of ideas have significantly declined at Middlesex.
There are multiple reasons why I think students are more reserved with their ideas now than in the past, but none is more influential than the nasty turn our national political dialogue has taken. Former President Donald Trump’s use of personal attacks, discriminatory comments, and inflammatory language have single-handedly plunged the national discourse into mud-slinging invective. But much more than Trump’s behavior, which perhaps only ignited existing tension, the coupling of identity and party over the last several decades has created an increasingly personal and consequently ugly partisan divide. Politics have become deeply personal for many Americans. Increasingly, Democrats and Republicans feel that the views of the other party are so fundamentally incompatible with their own that they cannot be friends, partners, or even neighbors with them.
At Middlesex, we value a sense of community above almost everything else, and the ugly political discourse of the nation threatens that because community cannot coexist with the caustic debate that we see in our government. At this critical juncture, we have the choice to step up to the challenge and model respectful dialogue or to ignore and suppress the pressing issues of the day to avoid the discomfort they could bring to our comfortable campus. Too often we choose to avoid conflict rather than attempt to handle it productively and respectfully.
Whether their perception is incorrect or not, many students feel that both the school’s administration and the student body more generally is hostile to opinions on both school policy and national politics. One sophomore who hoped to start writing was surprised that the school would let The Anvil publish articles that favored Trump over Harris, a sentiment broadly reflected with only 20% of Anvil poll respondents who said they supported Trump felt that they would not be judged by students or faculty for it. Opinion topics lists have moved away from politics in recent years and even when political topics are offered they are far from the most interesting or contentious. Students do not engage with pressing national issues in writing or in discussion because they fear that their peers or teachers will judge them negatively for their views. Broadly, the school community does not discuss contentious issues as much as it could or should for fear of hurt feelings or heated arguments.
The Anvil has struggled with expressing student opinion before. In November 1965, the Anvil addressed concerns over free speech in the wake of the “events in Selma, Watts, and Berkeley” by creating a “Letters to the Editor” section and defining the limits of free speech in the paper. In that year, they decided that the faculty editor could only object to false or slanderous content, not the opinion itself. The Anvil’s policy now is not so different—the paper is willing to publish a broad array of viewpoints, but the issue now is finding students who are willing to share their opinions.
In my experience with The Anvil, it is the students themselves rather than the administration that enforce these limits on student expression. But the school has not made much effort to stir student expression. The election task force is a step in the right direction, and the efforts of some teachers to promote dialogue in class are an often overlooked area of excellence. Overall, however, the school has shied away from conversation, rather than endeavoring to teach students how to handle sensitive issues with the respect and maturity we hope Middlesex graduates will bring to their adult lives.
Fundamentally, Middlesex students are scared to express themselves in class, in the dining hall, and in the paper because they worry (and often rightly so) that their classmates cannot hear controversial or dissenting political views and treat them with the same respect and kindness they did before, much less productively engage with them. It is a skill to have these discussions, one which the school could do better in training.
This year, I hope that The Anvil will help by pushing students to make interesting and thoughtful arguments about important national issues and Middlesex policies. Other students, namely those running the Politics Club and Women in Politics Club, are also providing spaces for such discussions. The school, however, must take the lead in promoting discourse by publicly committing to a policy of greater freedom of speech among students and continuing to seek out political speakers to spark campus discussion once again.
Jack Elworth
Indresh Chandel