This is a little story about something bad-but-ultimately-good that’s worth noticing – a simple little gem amid the cacophony of fear and war and moral failure and decline and decay that comprises most of our news media diet, day after day after day.  I hope it lifts you up like it lifted me.

A sour and ultimately threatening thread of social media banter recently unfolded on Yik Yak at Kenyon College where my daughter is a sophomore.  If you’re kind of old like me, you might not know what Yik Yak is.  Think of it as a kind of hyper-local Twitter, capturing posts only from those in the immediate geographic area, say within a radius of several miles.  Yik Yak is also 100% anonymous.  It was originally conceived, supposedly, to provide a forum for comedic observations within a community, observations that might venture into more edgy territory than would be normally be tolerated on other social media sites.  I’ve also heard it acts as a kind of “even bulletin board” mostly focused on sharing time and place of campus parties.

At Kenyon, edgy turned ugly in the form of a series of angry, hateful posts directed toward a women’s center on campus.  The authors of this vitriolic speech refused to engage in productive dialogue around the nature of their grievances, despite many attempts by the women they targeted, to do so.  This continued, and escalated into at least one threat of sexual violence.  Then the women’s center was broken in to, and materials for upcoming Take Back The Night activities on campus were stolen.

This activity was bad on its face; but it also seemed to strike at the heart of Kenyon’s identity as a place where differences are celebrated and supported, and mutual respect is assumed.

So how did this community of students, faculty and staff respond?  First, the President of the college posted a blog in which he condemned the activity as unacceptable and counter to the character and principles of the school.   He also provided historical context and other insights that lent heft to his stated positions.  But I think more importantly, he invited and encouraged the entire Kenyon community to stand up to this kind of destructive speech by publicly voicing  support for respectful speech via a newly formed, student-led Facebook page called #respectfuldifference.  The response has been overwhelming.  Student after student, alone, in pairs, in groups, athletic teams, male, female, fraternities, sororities, faculty, staff groups, and arts organizations — all of the diversity of Kenyon has risen up against this low-road hate speech to express allegiance to a higher calling. Here are a couple of examples, but you can see more by visiting the page yourself.

Now, as I was in the middle of writing this post, I learned of other episodes like this one that have taken place around the country and what colleges are doing to respond.  Rebecca Koenig provides a good review in the Chronicle of Higher Education, if you want some general background on the situation.  Ryan Chapin Match writes on the Huffington Post about the Kenyon experience alongside many others.   He argues, quite persuasively I would say, that colleges should ban Yik Yak from their campuses, likening it to “bathroom stalls without toilets.”  He asserts that there’s no legitimate purpose for such an anonymous forum.  I have to admit, I kind of agree.

But then, I kind of don’t agree.  Because college is, in a way, a final dress rehearsal for life.  It is a last stop for many young people to try on the practices of adulthood while still having the benefit of support and guidance from adults. I would love to ban Yik Yak from the entire planet.  But that’s not going to happen.  Like it or not, our kids are entering adulthood as the most over-exposed generation there has ever been, and I don’t see how that’s really going to change.  How will they know how to go about tackling the onslaught of social media ills, and other kinds of destructive social forces that are almost certainly going to darken their doors in future, if they’ve never encountered them before?

To me, there is real value for these students in practicing the art of owning their community, and learning to actively commit to forging a positive path of living.  It is an exercise in leadership and self-determination and in the essential, critical value of community.

These young people will soon be going out into the world, into their respective professional, personal, geographic and spiritual corners where they’ll be called upon to play a role in building each of those communities.  I think their tangle with Yik Yak will make a difference in that regard.  I think they now know something about themselves, about the nature and extent of their responsibility, about the power of community, and about what they are capable of effecting – that they perhaps didn’t know before.  And for those who were the targets of the attack, perhaps they now know a lot more about what it feels like to be supported by a broader community in a time of need.  Maybe this new knowledge is a good thing that will motivate them in the future, to take action when someone else is in the crosshairs.

Regardless, I am heartened by the way college communities like Kenyon are responding to the yuck in Yik Yak.   I think they’re an example for all of us.