Barack Obama likes to believe he is saving America. Indeed, it seems to Obama and his supporters that there is a national soul, and this soul is in peril. They contend that by reaffirming something about unity and common purpose, we can heal the nebulous wounds of the older generations and move forward. It’s a movement that excites young people. It’s a movement that warms hearts and makes us feel good. It’s a movement that anyone of any background should be able to get behind.

And it’s a movement that bothers me to no end.

There’s a similar movement on our own campus. We’ve heard constantly this school year about the need for Vanderbilt to move forward. As a community, they say, we need to embrace one another, celebrate our differences as well as our commonalities. Some of this movement is driven by the university, some of it by student groups and much of it by our elected undergraduate governing body, Vanderbilt Student Government.

The student body received an e-mail from the new VSG president, Joseph Williams, on Tuesday morning. The e-mail alerted students to a series of programming for the rest of the week seeking to promote a reaffirmation of one of the values of the Vanderbilt Community Creed: civility. The purpose of this hastily publicized programming? To tackle issues stemming from JuicyCampus, the online and anonymous gossip forum that has faded as most fads at Vanderbilt do.

This week’s initiative, inanely titled “We Are Vanderbilt” (as if there were any belief to the contrary), clearly doesn’t resolve the target issue. A small number of people (who may or may not actually attend Vanderbilt) anonymously posted offensive comments, and they don’t believe in civility. What do people who sign the pledge to show their “intolerance for hate speech” gain from doing so? Perhaps a sense of pride about their own beliefs or a feeling of solidarity with Vanderbilt students who share those beliefs, but this doesn’t necessarily change the culture.

This seems to be the overarching purpose: changing the culture at Vanderbilt. Apparently, ours is one of intolerance of people of other backgrounds or belief systems. Never mind that there was only one Vanderbilt undergraduate involved in the physical attack on a gay couple last fall; then-VSG president Cara Bilotta used the incident to indict a whole campus for a lack of compassion and understanding. The logic does not follow, but it makes us feel good to be the first to target a perceived problem and criticize ourselves for it.

In the same way, all those involved in organizing the indoctrination — excuse me, reaffirmation — take pride in their efforts to make a statement that is not bold and forward thinking, but bland and contrived. VSG and their ilk may believe they are saving Vanderbilt’s soul, but we would do well to relegate that job to vessels of our own personal faith or belief system.

The e-mail boldly proclaimed that the Vanderbilt community does “not tolerate gossip, slander or hateful speech,” and we must affirm our common values in opposition to this. I take issue with the last of these intolerable expressions. Gossip, of course, is only as consequential as the people who hear it make it, and we all know it is generally unnecessary. Slander is wrong, and quantifiably so: people cannot intentionally lie when attacking another person’s character, and empirical evidence can determine if attacks are true.

The term “hateful speech” and its cousin “hate speech” are different stories. “Hate” is a subjective term, and what may be hateful to some may be logical to others. There are those statements that are invariably offensive to all, but those are irrelevant in this discussion; if there is near-universal agreement that a statement is hateful and should not be tolerated, what good does a pledge reaffirming this create?

The “We Are Vanderbilt” initiative is annoyingly presumptuous in its presupposition that there is a culture of intolerance rampant on Vanderbilt’s campus, and its supporters are vastly out of touch with reality if they believe a poster of signatures and a mass of self-congratulating T-shirts can make some kind of difference. The initiative makes little sense, but it sure makes us all feel better about ourselves.