<p>that was a really good video. i don’t think it paints bowdoin particularly well, but it also is honest and, in a strange way, hopeful. i think many of the issues of bias discussed in the video are direct results of bowdoin’s size and its prestige and students’ unwillingness to be silent about it. i was gay at bowdoin and found it, for the most part, to be an open and remarkable place. but i came from a deeply religious, intolerant part of the country. i also thought the way race was treated at bowdoin was and, it appears, still is a work in progress. but the fact that students at bowdoin can envision a better way of interacting, are not drowned out by a sea of other complacent students, and have the courage to call upon their environment to live up to their vision is truly inspiring and is, perhaps, the best indication that they are, deeply and truly, bowdoin students. </p>
<p>i graduated a few years ago and being out in the world has made me realize how naive and hopeful i was at bowdoin. i was the type of student while i was there who would have made this video or been in it. i don’t want to cast too rosy a hue on all of this, but to see how i discuss issues of race or sexuality or gender now, as an adult, in a world that struggles so much more profoundly and in ways far more gruesome than we did once at bowdoin, makes me thankful for the maddening, upsetting, sometimes futile conversations i had as a student there. even to see the way i discuss them with friends who went to very similar schools has given me reason to think the way bowdoin addresses its issues is unique.</p>
<p>i will say that it is a college with a healthy critical sensibility. i am disappointed, as i was when i was a student, that incidents sometimes happen on campus to make students there feel unwelcome and alien as i sometimes felt. but i also wouldn’t have gone elsewhere, especially knowing what i know now. the way bowdoin reacts to those incidents is unique. the conversation that happens on campus about how a community can serve its diverse members is unique. the conversation needs to grow, but it happens, apparently, still, just as it happened when i was there. this isn’t in response to the OP, but the video was, for me, an occasion for reflection.</p>