Students in need of a little abuse, worry not – Syracuse University is bringing the oppression to you.

In its ongoing effort to promote diversity, the Office of Residence Life is sponsoring the fourth annual ‘Tunnel of Oppression’ tonight in the Schine Student Center. But organizers of the event are drawing fire from some of the very groups they are trying to help.

After two blackface incidents and an alleged anti-gay hate crime over the past two years, the tunnel is attracting more attention – much of it negative – for its unorthodox approach to social education.

The idea for the tunnel, a haunted house-like production with scenes depicting instances of ableism, racism, sexism, homophobia and other types of oppression, was created in 1994 at Western Illinois State University. It has since spread to campuses around the country and been highly successful and popular, winning ‘Program of the Year’ in 1995 from the National Association of College and University Residence Halls.

But the Beyond Compliance Coordinating Committee, a group at SU committed to raising disability consciousness on campus, questions the ability of such projects to create substantive change on campus.

‘It’s a freak show,’ said Rebecca Cory, a BCCC member and doctoral student in cultural foundations of education and disability studies. ‘It doesn’t actually challenge you, the student, to say ‘How should I be different and how do I participate as the oppressor?”

BCCC members, along with students from Open Doors and the Student Environmental Action Coalition, say that while the intentions of tunnel organizers are good, the ‘simulation’ method of education they espouse is too visceral and oversimplifies the complex issues surrounding oppression. In some incarnations of the program, for instance, students must watch a person in a wheelchair attempt to fit through a door that is too narrow.

‘The risk there is that someone walks out of the tunnel saying ‘Wow, it really sucks to be in a wheelchair,” Cory said.

She and others in the group are worried that students will take away the wrong idea because the issue is simplified to the extent that viewers see only the disability and not the whole person.

‘We have this cultural understanding that to understand someone you have to walk a mile in their shoes, roll a mile on their wheels. These people think that they’re providing that opportunity,’ said Liat Ben-Moshe, a BCCC member and doctoral student in sociology and disability studies.

However, Stephen St. Onge, associate director of the Office of Residence Life, suggested that BCCC’s characterization of the tunnel is misinformed.

‘It’s not just a visceral, sensationalized experience,’ St. Onge said. ‘It is also a powerful pedagogical experience.’

St. Onge noted that the roughly 15-minute trip through the tunnel is followed by a lengthy discussion led by facilitators where students talk about what they’ve seen and react to the scenarios in a constructive way. The point of having the tunnel, he said, is to give a context to that discussion – a vital component to raising consciousness about oppression. He added that ending the experience without a sufficient discussion would be ‘unethical.’

Debates rage on the effectiveness of a sensationalized experience in raising issue awareness. Sociology professor Debra Van Ausdale thinks confrontational exercises are ‘worse than profound, but necessary’ to shock people into understanding an issue.

After American troops entered German cities at the end of World War II, Van Ausdale said, they forced German citizens to walk through what was left of Nazi concentration camps – an illustration of what the German public allowed to happen. Those German families, many of them well-off and complacent about the war, claimed they had no idea of the kind of oppression carried out inside the camp walls.

In the same way, the Tunnel of Oppression, Van Ausdale said, can help promote awareness of salient issues many students aren’t faced with in their daily lives on campus.

‘The confrontational part of it provokes people, and we need provoking,’ Van Ausdale said.

The freshman-targeted program has been popular with undergraduate students at SU, St. Onge said, with sign-up lists filling up quickly each year.

Jason Jackson, a junior finance major who went through the tunnel the two previous years, was impressed with its effectiveness.

‘It makes you see issues, makes you think about them critically and rhetorically,’ Jackson said. ‘You have to see, sometimes, to believe what’s going on.’

BCCC members suggested alternatives to the tunnel, including sponsoring more speakers, forums and film festivals on campus. ‘It will be a very different discussion if you bring in a survivor of the Holocaust’ as opposed to making someone watch it, Ben-Moshe said. ‘What you discuss is going to be a world of difference between the two, and you can’t do a discussion on the structural basis of ablesim … or racism, or heterosexism, out of simulations. It doesn’t lend itself to that at all.’

BCCC members said they plan to go through the tunnel to see what it’s like before they make any conclusive judgements about it. After that, they say, they will be better informed to judge its worthiness and plan to issue a statement detiling their position.

On issues like these, when arguments from both sides are backed by an academic ideology, finding middle ground is often difficult. Van Ausdale, though she finds value in the visceral, also warns against putting it in too small a package.

‘There’s always a danger when you’re presenting something in a 15-minute time frame, but how else can we force people to recognize these things?’

Published on January 21, 2004 at 12:00 pm