The drive to campus this morning was blissful.
Last night, watching election results with colleagues, we compared our estimates of how many of our students voted. I extolled the virtues of my students, confident that at least 60 percent of them voted. And when I polled my first class, I happily found my guess was low. I gave them some praise - I didn't care who they voted for, I said, but I was proud of them for voting. Blissfully, I walked back to my office and prepared for the next class of the day.
Coming down the stairs on the way to my second class, I ran into my Dean who was beaming and asked, "Are you elated? I'm elated. I cried this morning when I listened to that speech again. I want to write all my professors who ever taught me any Civil Rights history. Aren't you elated?"
My Dean is effusive normally, but this was an entirely other level. This was Dean enthusiasm turned up to 11. And I was right there with her. I told her about my students voting, and that I felt like this is this generation's Kennedy moment. That I finally had an answer for a moment of history that I'd always remember that wasn't negative.
Then the conversation turned serious.
"It's a shame about what happened," she said.
Confused, I asked.
"About the graffiti," she said, with a sigh.
I didn't know about any graffiti, but it turns out someone on campus scrawled some ugly racial comments around campus. At least one piece of it was in an indelible form and required sand blasting to be removed, letting us know that Obama equals a racial slur. And in my second class, a student mentioned that there was evidently a Facebook stats flame war between Democrat and Republican student supporters.
A colleague reported later that a student in one of his classes said, "I'm tired of watching black people crying on TV just because a black man was elected President."
And another said a student told him of the graffiti, "It's just people expressing an opinion. What's the big deal?"
I've got some perspective on all this now, though for most of the evening, I and many of my colleagues were at wit's end. Evidently, we felt, we've failed in some truly fundamental way, not because of votes but because of a failure of empathy. It took me awhile to gain the perspective that my Dean had, able to keep that elation in the harsh light of our own campus events. Certainly, this election signaled that we've come a lot of metaphorical miles. But the morning after served as a reminder that we've got miles to go.
