Over the past month and a half, an infamous set of clips from First-Year Orientation, specifically I Am We Are’s “E Pluribus, Gustavus,” have caused an extreme amount of controversy on and off campus, regarding Gustavus’s public image. Numerous videos and articles have been written in response to it by the so-called outside world as a result. It’s an issue that has been discussed at length and spawned campus forums in response, and for good reason–there’s a lot to talk about.

Because of this, I am choosing to talk about it in two sections: first, on how it was presented, and second, discussing the issues at the heart of it. The second part, however, I will write on next week. So yes, Skeptical Prince will break the bi-monthly schedule he set up two weeks ago. Didn’t take long, eh?

While the actual concerns are brought up by students, specifically one infamous conservative Swede, much of the talk on campus has centered around the way these issues were presented. The videos take short segments of an hour-long presentation and label the clips as “Freshman Orientation.” Obviously, that’s absurd—the videos weren’t even all of “E Pluribus,” let alone all of the four-day First-year Orientation.

I have heard this called an intellectual crime— just as taking pieces of an article or argument out of context and presenting them as something else is considered academic dishonesty, so, too, are these videos. The severity of what was done is debatable. Most can agree that the videos are disingenuous, not representative of Gustavus or Orientation and were posted with the knowledge that those videos are less than one percent of the overall presentation to incoming students.

Add to this the fact that the student who posted the videos attended First-year Orientation, and the indictment starts to add up.

The real crime, however, is that the issues were not discussed in any way on campus before they were posted. There is absolutely a place and a time to take concerns off campus to the full public eye, a force effectively stronger than anyone in the administration. Starting a discussion by taking the nuclear option, though, is unproductive and, quite honestly, offensive to I Am We Are, everyone involved in First-year Orientation and the campus as a whole.

There are numerous people able and willing to discuss concerns on campus. The Dean of Students Office is full of amazing people who are easy to talk to. Student Senate, despite the reputation it gets for being slow and boring (which is, in some ways, deserved), has a working relationship with a lot of different people on campus–surprisingly, we even get things done sometimes, especially with concerns on campus. Even just talking to faculty can be surprisingly effective.

Sadly, none of those options were taken. Instead, knowingly bad information was put up on YouTube through altered clips with decidedly negative intentions. They have caused Gustavus as a whole to suffer, cost the college an estimated ***-load of money from alumni choosing not to donate and attempted to paint a group of well-intentioned and involved students in a decidedly poor light.

The irony in all of this is that the presentation has come close to killing the concerns. There are a select few people willing to discuss the “kernels of truth” at the heart of all the drama and maliciousness. That student missed out on a chance to actually accomplish something on campus—there are plenty of people receptive to what could have been said, but they have been turned off by the heaping pile of Fail it was presented in.