I reach out to you today to address things that have been bothering me about Capital University. I have done my part, raised my concerns and voiced my opinions. The ball is now in your court. Will you…accept?
What’s bothering me is this community. The community that is bound together within a city block. A community who bleeds purple and white. A community that is ready to come together in an instant, but a community where there is no tolerance. We have a problem. Will you address it?
With the recent invent of the TweetsByAnon website, our community has been bashed and sadly, our name slightly tarnished. Sure, it’s a silly little website, with silly little words, and silly little insults that will mean nothing in two years. And sure, our laundry has been aired, an error for all to see. But from here, we have to look past what has already been said. Like any adults, we realize that one must move on from such a situation. But doesn’t what was said make you wonder if a little thing called the Empathy Experiment worked?
Last year, upon the implementation of the “Empathy Experiment,” I was skeptical. How can you teach someone to feel the entirety of a natural-born human emotion? But, I gave it a shot. The results came in, and I am still skeptical. Don’t get me wrong– the theory behind teaching a bunch of lackadaisical twenty-something’s how to feel for one another is brilliant. I commend Dr. Bowman on his efforts to change the way our generation thinks and feels. But can you really teach someone empathy?
The answer to that question, at least from my education and knowledge, is no. No, you cannot teach anyone, at any age, how to truly feel for someone else. Just the same, you cannot teach a person happiness, or love, or hate. Those emotions are too strong in their context to be condensed down into a six week course on feeling. They are things that must be experienced on your own, without guidance and without help.
Empathy is something that you have to experience first-hand and under some greater power’s work. Yes, taking an upper-middle class college student and submitting them to a world that they’ve never been in, putting them in a life they would have never lived, making them feed the hungry, will teach them to feel some sympathy for the people that they’ve helped. Their eyes will be opened. But have they truly been changed? Or does the end result only reap benefits for days? Weeks? Months? To me, empathy is an emotion that can only be felt when it isn’t produced by an outside force.
A single mother of three, waiting in line at a food bank, not knowing if she’ll be able to feed her children, will feel things inside her that are too great to explain. Too great to reproduce with a slight of hand.
A homeless person who fights every day to find a warm place to rest their head at night will experience feelings that someone like me, a college student with a warm, secure place to lay our heads, can never experience. We cannot experience this until we ourselves are put in that position when it isn’t created and manufactured.
With all that’s happening on and around our campus, why not choose to focus on things and experiment with variables that truly hit close to home? Teach me about the loss of a loved one — a topic that all will no doubt deal with at some point in their life. There are students here who need to be taught about culture. Submitting these students to text books and tests about culture doesn’t allow them to take away any real-world lessons. They need to experience things that open their mind, yes, but empathy shouldn’t be the goal. Empathy that’s felt in fabricated situations is nothing more than sympathy towards something new.
The purpose of this piece wasn’t to call out Dr. Bowman. No mistakes have been made. In an experiment, the desired results never come on the first try. Change the variables, switch things up. Make me live with a fellow student for three days. Seeing what they do on a day-to-day basis. Seeing what kind of hardships people that I work with in the classroom, people that I live next to, eat with, bathe in the same showers as (at different times, of course), go through everyday.
I’ve proposed a challenge, Capital. Will you accept?
