Abdullah Albakri lowered and tapped his cigarette, scattering ash on the snow. “You know, when I moved to the United States, it was the biggest thing I've ever done in my life.”
Albakri is a Saudi Arabian national who first arrived at MSU in August 2011 as a student of finance and accounting. He raised his hand for another drag but paused to say, “Bozeman has its own society. People here are friendlier. So friendly, so accepting of people from other nations. They are open to different cultures. That’s why I love it.”
Albakri, or Abee as his Bozeman friends call him, spoke just weeks prior to the Feb. 27 debut of the Tunnel of Oppression, a grassroots diversity program originating from Western Illinois University that has spread to campuses across the nation since its initial creation in 1993.
The program features interactive exhibits utilizing a variety of mediums to expose participants to an array of abusive situations. Despite fiery criticisms from organizations like Accuracy in Academia and the Beyond Compliance Coordinating Committee of Syracuse University, the program has now spread to the MSU campus.
The MSU Diversity Awareness Coordinator overseeing Tunnel of Oppression, Phenocia Bauerly, said, “The goal of Tunnel of Oppression is to point out that oppression is all around us.” She considers the event to contain value beyond a textbook or movie, saying, “The point of Tunnel of Oppression is to be in your face — to stop dancing around the issues.”
Although many universities promote the program, Dr. Rebecca Barrett-Fox, a faculty member of the Sociology Department at Hesston College in Kansas, claims the “effectiveness of the program has not been proven,” and that “no data has been collected to determine if the presence of a tunnel on campus alleviates oppression.”
Attempts made on other campuses to demonstrate oppression through imagined representations rather than real, documented cases appear to degrade the program's credibility. For instance, an exhibit at University of Arizona’s Tunnel of Oppression in 2002 intended to address the cataclysmic six-year-long genocide known as the Holocaust by recreating a gas chamber complete with dry ice and a slamming metal door. The incomplete portrayal, though well intentioned, limited one’s understanding of the full extent of WWII’s horror.
Though not intended to represent the collective experiences of international students and other minority groups in Gallatin Valley, Abee’s refreshingly positive encounters with open-minded and friendly Bozeman locals and MSU students prior to the coming exhibit bring into question the necessity and relevance of a program like the Tunnel of Oppression on campus in the first place.
As a public university, MSU may be better off educating its students through scholarly texts and non-fiction narrative accounts of oppression as it has always done, rather than submitting students to shocking fictional portrayals that lack accuracy.
Since the program has yet to debut, one should not prematurely judge or criticize the organizations responsible for putting on MSU's Tunnel of Oppression. Describing the program as “not [nationally] standardized at all,” Bauerly states that the Diversity Awareness office “wanted to let student groups take it on their own.” Despite the inherent risks, the opportunity still exists for organizations involved with the event to develop an effective, positive and accurate exhibit. On Feb. 27, students will have the opportunity to make their own judgments.
