Last Friday in Illinois, Wheaton College lifted a 143-year ban on dancing. The newly liberated Wheaton students now face fresh challenges, such as how to dance and who to dance with. The students were free to try out their newly bestowed freedom all weekend, although many of them chose to practice at home a little before heading out to the clubs.
The day after Wheaton was liberated, Specialist John R. Sullivan of the 626th Forward Support Battalion, 101st Airborne Division, died in a helicopter crash over Mosul. Sullivan grew up 20 minutes away from Wheaton in Countryside, Illinois. He was 26 years old, and if circumstances were different, he may have been out dancing with Wheaton students Saturday night instead of flying in a UH-60 Blackhawk above Northern Iraq.
As Spc. Sullivan was fighting to liberate the Iraqi people, Wheaton students were struggling to liberate themselves. According to CNN, alumni expressed concern when the small Christian school lifted the dancing ban. Wheaton graduates and parents of current students were concerned that the college was getting too liberal, and that allowing dancing was the first slide down a slippery slope to hedonism and moral decay. The students, however, were most concerned with not looking like idiots on the dance floor.
With all the excitement at Wheaton, it’s easy to forget about people like Spc. Sullivan who are serving in the military. It’s easy to forget that even here at the University of Massachusetts in sleepy little Amherst, where students enjoy a liberal campus and many freedoms, there are people who sacrificed and served in Iraq. While the debate over the war rages on in classrooms, dorm rooms and even the school paper, for many students who are getting ready to ship out or who have returned from the Middle East, the Iraq question is not just academic.
Military units from nearby Westover and Springfield are currently deployed in Iraq, and many local veterans have returned to Massachusetts. As family members pace in front of their telephones, waiting for a call from their loved ones who are stationed overseas, UMass students are tying on their dancing shoes, oblivious to the emotional pain and sacrifices of local veterans and their families.
I work with veterans at the Dean of Students’ Office, so I talk to returning service members weekly. Across the board, they are thrilled to sit in a classroom again, sleep in a cramped but well-heated dorm room, write papers and do all the things that we take for granted at the University. They feel the same way Wheaton students did last weekend, precariously stepping onto the dance floor, nervous but hopeful.
However, Wheaton students are sharing this experience together. They’re teaching each other new steps, and they’re not laughing when a classmate slips on the dance floor. Wheaton is a small Christian college with a common set of beliefs that binds its 3,000 or so students together. UMass is a much larger institution and has a student body offering no such help to the returning or deploying community of veterans.
Even the school paper fails to recognize local veterans, but doesn’t hesitate to fill its pages with stories and editorials about the peace movement, ranging from angry calls for Iraqi resistance to thoughtful analyses of the conflict. UMass ignores the very worthy stories about University students for whom Iraq is not a chapter in a book, or a presentation in Political Science 121, but a reality that they must face as soldiers, families and humans.
Becca is a 2003 graduate of UMass’ wildlife and fisheries department, former coxswain on the school’s crew team and engaged to Plymouth, Massachusetts native and soldier in the U.S. Army, Jim. Last semester, I had dinner with Becca in the Blue Wall and handed out yellow ribbons in the Campus Center with her as she suffered through each day and worried about her fianc
