A group of about 15 graduate students, professors and intrigued undergraduates assembled in the lobby outside the Schine Student Center Underground on Thursday night. Most had little idea what to expect – only that there would be a tunnel, and it would be oppressive.

At 7 p.m., the doors opened, a short introduction was read, and the group shuffled into the dimly lit space, normally a venue for dance parties and talent shows.

To the right was a black curtain neatly graffitied with an array of slurs rivaling any crack alley in Brooklyn. ‘Tunnel of Oppression’ volunteers left no insult unwritten, lining the curtain with words like dyke, spic, homo, nigger, gook, fag, pussy and ghetto. The group walked slowly by, paying little attention to the wall once they got the idea that it was offensive.

The opposite wall was smattered with statistics and information about rape, hate crimes and other forms of oppression, which most of the group glossed over like a Physics 105 reading assignment.

‘This is bullshit,’ said a student in a greek-lettered sweat shirt as the group walked between the slurs and the stats. ‘What is all this gay stuff over here? I can’t take it,’ he said, prompting quizzical looks from group members. The student was planted in the group to give tunnel-goers the idea that oppression is all around them – and that it belongs to organizations.

Once the group had its fill of oppressive language, they were herded into the women’s bathroom, where the walls were covered with magazine cutouts of waif-like supermodels with airbrushed cleavage. A thin woman with long brown hair stood in front of the mirror, talking to her friend on a cell phone. ‘You know how Britney has her hair?’ she said, her voice inflected with cluelessness. ‘How does she get that stomach? I’m so freaking fat!’ Everyone seemed to know what was coming. Some even rolled their eyes.

She turned around and threw up in the toilet, flushed it and frowned at herself in the mirror.

Then it was on to the gang rape.

As a strobe light flashed from behind a curtain, a tunnel volunteer told the group to gather around a video monitor, where a scene of a violent gang rape extracted from the film ‘The Accused’ played on mute. Two men in the Schine Underground control booth smirked as they watched clean-cut frat boys violently rape Jodi Foster. The rest of the group stared at the screen, some reviled, some unaffected. One man turned away and walked back to the wall of statistics while he waited out the eight-minute scene.

The gang rape was followed by several separate scenes in which tunnel actors simulated physical abuse, verbal slurs written on dorm white boards, instances of homophobia, classism and racism.

In the last scene, the darkest and some say most disturbing, a freshman student sat at his dorm room desk complaining about his life. He doesn’t have any friends, doesn’t like his major, can’t get girls, can’t go back home, hates his parents. He’s hopeless. The last thing the group heard in the tunnel was the sound of the student blowing his head off behind a curtain. But this time, the stereo malfunctioned and the gunshot went off twice.

‘SIMPLIFIED AND STEREOTYPED’

‘The Tunnel contains some harsh language and imagery. It is designed to be realistic, not to offend,’ reads the introduction to the ‘Tunnel of Oppression,’ quickly recited to students before they entered the darkened Schine Underground. Though tunnel organizers have tried to accurately represent situations that happen every day, some students remain unconvinced that the oppression represented in some tunnel scenes actually exists.

Matt Reitman, a junior women’s studies and sociology major, had his doubts about a scene in which an Asian student finds the words ‘gook’ and ‘chink’ written on her dormitory white board. ‘I’d argue that things like that don’t exist,’ he said.

In reality, over the past year at SU, bias-related incidents involving slurs on residence hall white boards have skyrocketed. Opponents of the tunnel concede that it attempts to illustrate real forms of oppression, but they argue that the presentation makes the events seem unlikely and unbelievable.

Mara Sapon-Shevin, a professor of inclusive education, emerged from the tunnel fuming. She had brought one of her classes to the event so they could experience its much-touted educational value.

‘All I learned from going through the tunnel is that shit happens,’ Sapon-Shevin said. ‘What did I learn from watching an eight-minute rape scene? That men are assholes? I’m sorry I brought my class.’

Sapon-Shevin, however, did not attend the 40-minute ‘debriefing,’ in which students were led through a facilitated discussion about issues presented in the tunnel. That discussion, Office of Residence Life Associate Director and Diversity Committee Chair Stephen St. Onge said, gives context to the visceral images in the tunnel.

But the Beyond Compliance Coordinating Committee, the main oppositional group, laid out its objections to the tunnel’s methodology in a statement issued yesterday, calling it potentially harmful to students’ understanding of oppression.

‘The scenes presented in the tunnel all depicted events that do happen. However, they were not based on specific true instances – they all dealt in simplified and stereotyped representations of situations. This, combined with the level of theatricality employed to create a visceral response, made the scenes appear overly dramatic and harder to believe,’ the statement said.

Taken by itself, both sides agree, the tunnel is not an effective learning tool. St. Onge said the real learning takes place in the small group discussion sections following the tunnel, but critics say even that discussion is superficial and doesn’t help students understand what they saw.

BCCC members say St. Onge and ORL have it all wrong. In their view, the discussions should stand on their own, and the wrong message is sent when they are combined with a ‘haunted house of victims.’

As the debate between ORL and the tunnel’s opponents heightens, Bob Bogden, the director of SU’s social science program, finds educational value in the disagreement. Bogden, who specializes in disability studies, has not been through the tunnel himself, but sees the heightened level of opposition as a sign that learning is happening on both sides.

‘I like to have people protest,’ Bogden said. ‘Exposing people to new experiences of any sort – that’s what education is all about.’

Published on January 25, 2004 at 12:00 pm