by Andrew Price
Daily Lobo columnist
I have a beagle who is one of my best friends.
I shouldn't say "have" because our relationship is more like that of roommates. In order for him to do as I say, he needs to agree with the suggestion - otherwise, he will more or less do as he pleases.
Up until last October, I also had a cat. It wasn't unusual to come home and find the two of them lounging around together sometimes with both their heads on my pillow. They were also friends. However, when my sister's dogs would come to visit, all bets were off. The dogs, including my beagle, would bark and growl and chase the poor cat to the point that he got fed up and went to live somewhere else.
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This pack phenomenon got me to thinking about how we at the University are the same way, and will sometimes say and do things that we normally wouldn't when we are in a group as opposed to being alone. Some of our instructors use this to their advantage.
This pack behavior is unfortunately quite common.
Three teenagers beat a homeless man to death in Florida in January - why couldn't one of them stand up and say, "No, we shouldn't do this"? The Nazi party in Germany decided that it would be a good idea to try to kill off an entire race of people back in the 1940s. Why didn't the guards just say no when it came time to throw the switch on the gas chamber? Imagine all the atrocities throughout time that could have been averted had cooler heads prevailed.
The answer lies in how we think, or rather, how differently we think as individuals as opposed to how we think when we are in a group.
Have you ever wondered how two people can look at the same event and, when asked to describe it, come up with vastly different versions? We all have separate brains, memories and beliefs through which we filter our versions - it is no wonder that our opinions vary. Here at the University, staff members try their best to teach us how to think. This is all well and good, except for the hidden agendas that some here on campus seem to put forth.
If you are teaching math, literature, psychology or ancient history, why is it necessary to make politically motivated comments? Instructors, some of them with lots of letters after their name, stand up in the front of class and make comments, which are nothing more than opinions, sound like facts.
One psychology instructor told a story about how people with Broca's aphasia could somehow tell that Ronald Reagan was lying during some speech back in the 1980s. I'll tell you, those people afflicted with aphasias can be pretty darned intuitive. This semester, I counted 20 slurs against various Republicans during a 50-minute class, and I didn't start counting until about 15 minutes into it.
For some people at UNM, this may be their first time away from home, that time in a young person's life where he or she starts to identify which beliefs and values to live by. I am here to tell you that you don't have to pick up values and beliefs in package deals. Liberals can be anti-abortion and conservatives can be against the war.
For every professor who has one opinion, there is another professor just as smart and credentialed who has a different one. Although we are susceptible to the pack behavior phenomenon, we don't have to give in to it.
Dare to be the student or professor who has your own opinion. You don't have to laugh when someone makes some ignorant joke about Bush's intelligence - he has beaten the liberal candidate in two national elections.
Dare to be the one who stands up and questions the powers that be - be the one who says no. Dare to not chase the cat.
