This is absolutely ridiculous.
"Wark recalls getting a call from a parent who had "psychological and sanitary concerns" about a student's new roommates, both of whom were gay men."
Call me judgmental, but, first of all, sanitary concerns about GAY men? Talk about barking up the wrong tree. (I live with three straight men, by the way.) Second of all, what the hell? I know that jerkdom is by no means restricted to parental status, but please I hope that for every parent who is a jerk, there's a non-jerk in the wings to cancel him or her out. (And also note that I cannot explain why this topic resonates so much for me, all the time, for reasons of employment and other perks that I enjoy, but it DOES.)
Whatever happened to going out and living your life? I'm so close to my parents it's ridiculous, but I have been free to decide with whom and where to spend my time, independent of their judgments (and sometimes to their panic and disappointment) for many, many years now. I was given what I believe is one of the most important things you can get from a family situation, and that is the open ability to form my own opinions and relationships.
It hasn't always worked out to my advantage. I used to be particularly slow on the uptake when it came to who and what was good for me and who and what wasn't. But I had things to work through relative to common developmental issues, like "the popularity myth: self-loathing, jockeying for position, and other adolescent joys" and "just because you say you're my bff doesn't mean a damned thing when you ditch me for someone else at 2 a.m." You know. Stuff like that.
It must be done. This is America, home of "Mean Girls" and "Heathers" and "Bill and Ted" and cowboy movies rife with betrayal of homies right and left. And although I've made many missteps, often in the white hot glare of my mother standing there going, "I just don't knooooooowwwww about that girl/guy", with my dad in the background going, "Whatever you think is right. It's up to you" (maddening!) it's common psychological knowledge that that which our parents refute and judge is that which we are either going to likely want to consume in mass quantities or reject outright in fear that they will no longer love us and kick us out of our dysfunctional family units, not knowing for a hot second what we ourselves would do if we were open to independent thought. I don't know why this is. I'm a counselor, not a clinical psychologist. I'm sure you can find it in Freud's stash somewhere. Maybe I'll look it up later. I believe there is a reason though why every person I knew raised in a particular fundamental Christian church was either a missionary or a drug addict by their second year in college. When things are black and white, no essay question, parent knows best and don't you forget it, it gets really freaky when life doesn't turn out that way, or your FEELINGS send you in a direction that you never dreamed you'd go, or you were told that you under any circumstances whatsoever must not. It's an unavoidable part of the beautiful disaster of life that people do not exist in checklist form. So either you try to make it that way and head for a remote location to teach English or you throw out the list and fire up another joint. (And I'm NOT saying that ALL people who do these things are doing so in response to anything other than free will. Just most of the people in my old circle.)
It's a different situation if you think a person you love is in harm's way, and is too ignorant or brainwashed or like adjective to get him or herself out of a situation. If my sister were moving in with someone I'd seen smoking crack on a couch or raising his hand to her, I might be trolling Facebook with a little more reckless abandon, knowing full well however that no matter how much I knew I was right, she might reject my attempts to help her and consider me the one with the problem. But if she moved in with a gay man or woman? Awesome! Let's add some extra dressing to the stereotype salad and say "YAY! Softball tourneys, Natty Boh, and black labs running amok in the backyard!" or "A pink fuzzy couch and Top Chef marathons in the living room for everyone"
But we have a winner. We have, because that is what we need, someone to blame. And it's a PROFESSOR casting stones at the late Mr. Rogers.
Anyone who blames Fred Rogers for screwing up kids by being one voice of sweetness and light in a cruel world that also included 9/11, George Bush, and the Smurfs with their degraded language skills ("That's just SMURFY!" What?) missed the politics, pop culture AND pop media train about fifteen years back. This kind of reasoning would also allow me to blame the Wicked Witch (and her sadistic dog-killing alter ego Miss Gulch. Yeesh. I need to seek out a biography of L. Frank Baum to see what went on in his childhood.) in the Wizard of Oz for my occasional lapses into unexplained tears and gently neurotic core. Let us always blame pop culture, and take the responsibility squarely off of our shoulders. Forget killing my television - apparently it killed ME. It's not like any of us have brains, or central nervous systems, or learn anything from books.
Mr. Rogers belonged to my people anyway. He was the Grandpa changing his shoes for millions of Generation Xers, and we still churned out a mass of people who died in the name of grunge and Tiffany in Playboy years after she hit the shopping mall. He cannot be co-opted for the millennials, who would also not know a thing about the homoeroticism of Land of the Lost either, taught as they were to fear the Teletubbies and THEIR leering, seductive ways. Fred Rogers was old news by the time these kids were out of pull-up pants, so back off.
Facebook is a thing. It is a place, as is MySpace (which I blame for poor spelling and pink lacy banner graphics, among other things, but not the decline of civilization, because clearly Mr. Green Jeans is to blame for that, right?) and that dinosaur Friendster and Flickr and whatever other place you choose to dump your personal information online. Facebook's powers can be used for good or for evil. You can wish a friend a happy birthday or be a creepy stalker (she's not that into you. Stop checking her status.) or you can play Scrabble, or do what most people seem to be doing and spend endless amounts of time adding and removing these tacky applications that are turning it into a wasteland of unnecessary drop kicking and pwning. Using Facebook for roommate shopping is an activity for college students. If you want an account of your own, for your own, you know, LIFE, that's fine. If you're using it to profile your kid's friends for ANYTHING unrelated to criminal activity (and even then, if they're 18, it's their bag and the university's, no matter who's paying the bill) that's just a shame.
If I show up and the person in my room has swastikas on the wall and a white hood in the closet, I'm going to residence life and I'm probably going to cry at some point and they'll move me or I'll move myself. They may not have put that on their profile, so like most things in life, I have to see it in person. My graduate school roommates had an argument one weekend while I was home, and I came back to a house full of profanity-laced notes on doors and the knowledge that the one with the "good girl" persona drank a beer every morning before class and buried it in the garbage can. Why this bothered the other one - a compulsive shopper with a rage disorder who then paraphrased Sheryl Crow by constantly singing "JULIE likes a good beer buzz early in the morning" while stalking around the house in a green mud mask, I don't know. It wasn't my business or my problem. They were both gone by Christmas, and I got an apartment off-campus. Most roommate situations turn out to be a little bit sketchy and given to extremes.
Regardless, Facebook alone cannot give you the sum of a person, and in many cases misrepresents them entirely. A photo of my old roommate would never have let on that she needed a beer to face the day on campus, or that the other one would get her car keyed by an Ohio housewife in the WalMart parking lot for shouting "F'ing MOTIVATE!" behind her in the parking lot. If you looked at my profile now, you'd think I was a fuzzy, glowy, chubby girl with a thing for pop culture who lived my life in the blogosphere.
Wait. Haha. No, really. I'm much more complex than that.
You would not know that if your daughter or son had lived with me at 18 that I would have been friends with people who were WAY higher up in the social hierarchy than I was, who still considered me a commodity because I gave advice that only a square peg can give, because I lived on the outside of a number of worlds that never really let me in. And also that I was funny, and was friends with a ton of different people, as my friend Heather says, "infiltrating many groups, aligning myself with none." You would not know, independent of my sexual orientation or the color of my skin, that I would not by any means allow your child to die in a pool of their own vomit after a night of ill-advised freshman year drinking. You would not know that I would have the courage to stand up to a 200-pound asshole with additional beer muscles who was harrassing your child of either gender, and I'd sooner let someone pound on me than any friend of mine.
I'm really glad I didn't have Facebook in college, because I wasn't secure enough then to know that a social networking site is not indicative of who anyone is, or certainly who our friends are. If you'd seen a page of mine from 1989, you would have known the surface, and what I chose to represent to the world to make sure, in my immature need for "friends" and acceptance, that I got it from wherever it was willing to come. I may not have had the courage to tell you, at that time, if I were, that I was gay, or maybe I would have pretended to be even though I'm not, because it was cool. I had no idea that external motivations and rewards aren't where it's at. I did not know myself at the time, in all my current self-aware glory.
I know there are more distractions now. I know parents love their children. But I also know that discriminating against another for reasons of religious, ethnic or sexual orientation is against the policies of most institutions of higher education in the United States, and certainly against Federal law, so if colleges and universities are doing this to satisfy "customers", they are not only breaking their own often enforced policies, they are killing the intention of a university education. It is not, as is currently often believed, to hook a kid up with a high five figure job, or provide a home base for spring break trips. It is to teach critical thinking skills, and to increase intellectual knowledge and personal productivity.
I also, truly know that there is a distinct fear of sending ourselves and those we care about off into a world that we can't imagine is better, only frighteningly different, a world where we (oh my WORD) have to live with people who don't act and talk and look and partner exactly like we do. But if people are going to these lengths to protect what I KNOW are the most precious things in their lives, with no knowledge of any personal harm done to anyone involved, this just isn't the right way.
And by teaching this kind of openness and honesty, I'm sure their kids have a triple-protected secret profile in the Singapore network. If you're looking for trouble, it's easy to overlook your own backyard.
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