Every time I go to a large lecture hall I am discriminated against. In 100 Willamette, there are 30 left-handed desks out of 150. In 150 Columbia, there are over 500 desks, but only a handful are suited for left-handed students. Uninformed right-handed students haplessly sit at the end of rows, where the few lefty-style seats are located, because it’s either easier to ditch when the lecture gets boring or easier to bolt for the door when the class ends.
Discrimination of lefties has been prevalent throughout the last two thousand years. Elementary school teachers still hit lefties for writing with the “sinister” hand; power tools maim, mangle, and kill lefty construction workers; and the overwhelming presence of right-hand specific objects (scissors, guitars, notebooks, computer mice, driving with the right foot) squashes any identity of the left-handed person. Language reflects a bias as well. “Ambidextrous” means “right-handed at both sides”, since “dexter” is the Latin root for “right”. “Sinister” originally meant “left” in Latin but eventually was identified with “evil”.
The University of Oregon has done nothing to further the cause of the left-handed minority or stop oppression perpetrated by the right-handed majority. All we get is a half-hearted attempt at appeasement, with the placement of a handful of lefty desks in large lecture halls and, if we’re lucky, one or two in other classrooms on campus. The administration needs to wake up and realize that by blatantly ignoring a group of students who are statistically more prone toward genius and higher levels of creativity (the exact population that needs to attend the University), they are harming the intellectual integrity of America and fundamentally denying left-handed students a chance to reach their full potential.
Aaron McCoy
University student