The tormenting of Tyler Celmenti that led to his suicide was a hate crime against gays and, technically, the production and dissemination of pornography. But the hatred perpetrated against a gay student on a college campus was rooted in a deeper cultural conflict over the purpose of a college education.
Tyler Clementi was a music student. According to nj.com, the bully and cameraman Dharun Ravi was a computer expert and his cohort was a pharmacy major. Already the conflict between two approaches to a college education are apparent.
Tyler Clementi was trying to find himself. He explored his individual talents. In high school he developed his abilities as a violinist, presumably with parents who paid for his music lessons and gave him encouragement. College, for him, would be a process of self-actualization, self-knowledge and freedom.
Consider the culture that Ravi and Wei grew up in. In the traditional cultures dominant among many parents in New Jersey, a heterosexual marriage is virtually mandated by parents for all young people. There is an enormous social pressure, especially among the women, that they have to get married and have to search for a spouse. The idea of remaining single and / or not having children is considered a violation of the cultural norm.
The decision about the choice of a major is often made by the parents and not by the students. There are parents who state openly that they want to fill their children's heads with technology. Parents threaten to withold financial support from their children if they do not major in the subject of their parents' choice. (I grew up in the East Coast and personally experienced this, as my traditional working class Jewish parents had threatened to remove me from college if I took art courses and demanded that I major in elementary education, and I had to go to a lawyer who was an admissions dean to protect my right to remain enrolled and to have an independent student status to work my way through school without asking for support from parents. And I witnessed the situation of someone who turned to alcohol, drugs and life on Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley after an attempt by parents to force him into s summer job with a law firm.) I have experienced and witnessed parents dictating to their children that they are going to major in business, technology, or a medical field. I have experienced and witnessed parents forcing their children to take accounting courses rather than history courses. The students are supposed to be like robots, the development of their minds goverened by their parents' wishes.
I have met the products of such culture, three or four years beyond the Ph.D. in engineering or out of law school, miserable in their jobs at staid, regimented West Coast companies, trapped in the lives their parents created for them, not knowing how to escape. Living a life in which they would never experience personal fulfillment. And I have seen the parents, bragging about their children's jobs at Goldman Sachs and seeing these emotionally (and sometimes also physically) emaciated young adults, going through life with little or no affect or personality.
In this traditional culture college is thought of as vocational school, with no other value than materialism. The religion is not Christianity or Judaism or Hinduism, but one of financial planning. All life decisions are to be made based upon the external considerations of money and the self is to be obliterated. The ultimate goal is a palatial McMansion. The idea of life as a happy violinist renting an apartment in New York is unthinkable.
This attitude is furthered in the workplace, where employees are encouraged to suppress their preferences in order to fit in and to avoid expressiong an opinion. Employers and conservative career coaches rail against being "high maintenance," one coach recently advising workers to "suck it up" in order to "get along." Everyone is supposed to be an interchangeable part, passive with no aspirations or individual proclivities or preferences.
In the room shared by Tyler Clementi and Dharun Ravi, the cultural clash came to a head. Ravi, the computer geek, came face to face with a student who experienced his individuality and developed his talent, who didn't feel forced to enter unhappily into a heterosexual marriage just for appearances, who approached college as an experience of personal growth, and whose family had given him the tools to do so. Ravi had to face, head on, his own cowardice and the pre-programmed nature of his life. And rather than challenge his own assumptions, or overwhelmed by the enormity of the task, he exploded, he reacted with hatred and jealousy against someone who represented everything that was missing in his own life and his perception of his future.
And for those of us who have taught in the college or high school classroom, or who are teaching now, one of our responsibilities is to alert students to this dichotomy over the purpose of education, and to encourage (provide courage to) the students to explore who they are as individuals, and to take the courses they are interested in while preparing for a livelihood.