Vanderbilt students activists, like James Lawson before them, are on a quest for justice
Re: "Student sit-in at Vanderbilt over Israel-divestment vote ends Wednesday, students arrested," March 27.
I love you, Vandy. The arboretum of the West campus, the classical landscaping of the East campus, the labs and clinics of the South.
I am grateful for my 30 years with you, three as a student, 27 as staff or faculty.
For the care of my family, an education that changed my thinking, the opportunity to work with brave, wonderful physicians and nurses and researchers.
For my church on your campus.
We must learn from the past and make things right
I’ve seen our past. I know we were bad to Rev. James Lawson and then tried to make it right. We all want freedom and security, in different doses. Finding a way to hold together while we are holding thoughts and feelings differently is a challenge, and I value the scholarship and slow mind that Vandy brings to this hard work as well as the creative flow of its artists and social leaders.
The baked-in part of my personality (now age 79) was cooked in childhood after World War II when the horrors of the Holocaust impressed my young mind, and the empathy I feel for Gazans now is likely due to the empathy I felt for Anne Frank as a young girl then.
We humans and our institutions try to heal, in the words of Reverend Lawson, “the hole in the middle of the soul.”
Due to our individual and large-group backgrounds we have some “givens” that likely won’t change for us after a certain point in our lives. We are different from one another.
At 79, I am looking to young people for hope
I want to listen, speak, and act. Maybe I want to act more than Chancellor Daniel Diermeier would like.
And administrators have power.
Working together with different perspectives and levels of power is hard. I won’t give up on Vandy, and I hope Vandy won’t give up on the students who make up the activist movement that will be seen, 60 years from now, as a justice-seeking movement led by brave young people.
Lynne L. McFarland, M.Ed 1985, MSN 1991, Nashville 37204.
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This article originally appeared on Nashville Tennessean: Vanderbilt students seeking justice for Gaza want a better future
