If the Tribune’s editors had a point in last week’s editorial, entitled “Tribal Frosh and the tone of campus debate”, it was certainly lost on me-and surely most other smart McGillians-when it plunged into an utterly juvenile lambasting of the, so -called, “anti-MUS campaign” (sic). The editorial used a condescending, outrageous and offensive tone in its criticism of the “tone of campus debate,” and, more specifically, the tone of the “anti-MUS campaign.”
Did this “anti-MUS campaign” actually seek to “hammer the opposition over the head until the latter submit[ed] to their overpowering will” or “bludgeon others into compliance?” Moreover, I’d like to know how the “tone of campus debate” was improved when the mudslinging Tribune editors accused student activists of engaging in a “university-level version of bullying,” or when the Tribune editors demeaned student engagement in campus affairs by calling it a “screeching temper tantrum.” Do any of the above quotes, pulled from last week’s editorial, display a commitment to the “atmosphere of moral and intellectual education” ostensibly sought after by the Tribune editors? Did the tone of the editorial’s argument completely undermine the very argument it was trying to make? I would like the Tribune “to consider these questions,” too, before writing their next editorial.
Also, don’t misrepresent what happened at the Choose Life protests last year. There was no “physical sort” of “bullying” committed; I saw the whole thing. That’s just bad reporting and I expect more out of the Tribune.
