“I am in love with a 61 yr old woman,” “I change my ipod to Bach at crosswalks, because I would be mortified if I died getting hit by a car while listening to SPICE Girls,” and “ha ha ha ! no silly, I’m not here because of affirmative action…so you can stop staring now.”
Those are just a few of the secrets voluntarily and anonymously exposed by Wellesley College students (and highlighted in The Wellesley News) as part of a program launched this fall by the school’s Campus Wide Diversity Initiative. Students submitted at least a couple hundred decorated postcards to the project revealing their innermost secrets for all the campus to see as part of a public display that has been shown at the student center among other places.
The project is inspired by the PostSecret web site, which since the start of 2005 has done the same thing but on a much broader scale.
At Wellesley, some debate has emerged (such as in the Counterpoint magazine, Wellesley College’s “journal of campus life”) over whether exposing secrets is cathartic or just another way to keep people from expressing themselves face to face with other humans. Organized discussion has taken place on campus to review issues raised on the postcards and students plan to issue reports for the administration on their findings.
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