Valentine's Day in The Pit

Click here to receive your FREE subscription to Campus Technology

Home > Valentine's Day in The Pit

Opinion

Valentine's Day in The Pit

2/27/2007

By Terry Calhoun

I can look back on various personal relationships over the years and, without regretting who I have become, regret having acted in ways that were less than thoughtful, and which hurt others. I'm sure that you can, too; maybe not if you are a Neocon. But boy, oh boy, there was a powerful event at UNC on Valentine's Day. And the way the adult world reacted to it was pretty interesting.

When I first read the stories, I was shocked at the apparent lack of sensitivity and obvious meanness of Ryan Burke, a senior at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, who used Facebook and text-messaging to bring together a crowd of more than 1,000 students at The Pit, in the center of campus, to watch him abusively break up in public with his unsuspecting girlfriend of four months, Mindy Moorman, with the help of a women's a capella group singing the Dixie Chick's "I'm Not Ready to Make Nice."

They exchange harsh words--several of them four-letter epithets--while the audience watches, laughs and jeers. At one point, the crowd starts chanting "slut, slut, slut" at the woman. She fights back (verbally), telling her by-then-ex that if he needs an audience to break up with her, he must have the problem. Many of those watching have cameras and are filming throughout, and numerous videos quickly end up on YouTube, where in less than two weeks they have attracted more than 500,000 viewers--along with parody videos, Facebook groups pro and con, and much debate.
--Inside Higher Ed

You can watch some YouTube of this event here and here, and you can watch an interview with Burke here.

When I first read of this story, I had just read a recent report about how powerful/egotistical people have difficulty writing a capital letter "E" on their foreheads (without looking in a mirror) in a way that others could read it while looking at them, apparently because they just don't naturally think in ways that let them put themselves behinds others' eyes.

So, of course, I was immediately wondering if Ryan Burke could draw a backwards "E" on his forehead without looking into a mirror. Then, a little while later, reading an Inside Higher Ed story titled "Jerry Springer U.," and, following some of the comments, I was sympathizing with the administrators on that campus. One commentator wrote: