To the Editor:
Professor Luxon is right to be enraged by the laughter he heard from certain individuals in the audience upon viewing a disgusting mockery of a post-mastectomy woman. Both the scene and the laughter were extremely disturbing. Furthermore, as a current brother of the same fraternity in which that took place, I was very embarrassed.
I cannot express strongly enough how disgusted by this I was, and I am very angered by Professor Luxon's portrayal of me as one who espouses and "waxes nostalgic" about such behavior or similarly offensive scenes that were to follow. Contrary to his hasty association of me with these insensitive buffoons, I did not laugh at this scene. I stared in utter disbelief at the images on the screen, as most others in the audience did.
I had absolutely no objection when the Professor commented on what was visible in the video itself, such as what exactly the pledge on the tape was imitating. As he had mentioned earlier in his presentation, someone watching the video for the first time might not have realized exactly what that was, and he made sure we knew. Such objective analysis is necessary to clarify what's going on in the video.
However, I later spoke up because I wanted to watch the rest of the video without gratuitous narrative comments that I perceived to be very slanted and speculative. "Can you let us judge it for ourselves?" That's all I said. I don't think my request was at all rude or unfair. Before starting the tape, the professor implored us to refrain from introducing any "polemic" until after seeing the video and hearing the audio tape, but he seemed to exempt himself from this guideline throughout the presentation. At the outset, the professor commented that members of the audience were "wearing their agendas on their heads" (e.g., fraternity hats), that 'hell night' is a central part of fraternity life, and made loaded remarks based on heavily biased inferences throughout the (five minutes of) video.
I didn't go to the presentation to further any "cause." I simply went to watch a video that I had heard was very controversial. I wish Professor Luxon would not classify me as a supporter of such reprehensible idiocy simply because I wanted to watch and judge for myself, without the aid of biased conjecture.
