On Sunday the Wesleyan Student Assembly (WSA) passed a resolution to resubmit last year’s chalking proposal to President Doug Bennet. Students presented Bennet with the proposal during his lunchtime office hours today.
The decision, according to WSA member Emily Polak ’05, went unopposed in the WSA and shows that nearly a year after Bennet’s ban on chalking, student opinions remain unified in their disapproval of the ban.
“[The proposal] is being presented as coming from the majority of the Wesleyan student body and the WSA,” Polak said.
Polak said that approximately 35 students of all class years have regularly been attending WSA meetings to voice their dissatisfaction regarding chalking.
Rather than drafting a new document, WSA members decided to keep last year’s proposal unchanged.
“It’s a proposal that stands as a reflection of a huge group of people and a huge amount of work,” Polak said.
Jeremy Abrams ’05, the chair of the WSA Community Outreach Committee (COCO), said that last year many WSA members felt that Bennet largely ignored the proposal and was unreceptive to the WSA’s solutions despite what they perceived as their viability.
“We thought the document fairly balanced the need for expression and the need not to offend the Wesleyan community [but Bennet] restricted both the good and the bad without acknowledging the use of chalking,” he said.
Both Polak and Abrams stated that though opinions varied among WSA members about the extent to which controversial chalkings should be tolerated, all considered Bennet’s unilateral ban inappropriate.
Last year, Bennet and others criticized chalking as a medium that, due to the anonymity of the chalkers, allowed students to write controversial and offensive messages without accepting responsibility for them. Abrams said that although these unsigned statements sometimes posed legal issues, they also provided a voice to students who may otherwise have remained silent.
Zach Goldstein ’05, a student who has been working towards re-instating chalking on campus, explained that chalking traditionally provided an outlet for the LGBTQQ and student of color communities. He cited the hostile reactions towards the two male students who kissed in the basement of DKE last year and the group who camped out outside of Olin as examples of political venues in which student voices were potentially limited because specific faces were attached to the actions.
“Chalking is important as a way for students to safely express their opinion,” he said. “The absence of chalking has had an effect of the ability of groups to express themselves on a large scale.”
Sections B and C of the chalking proposal provide a method for dealing with controversial chalkings. Section B states that members of the campus community can have references made to themselves removed by contacting the Office of Affirmative Action. Similarly, according to section C, if someone feels that a specific chalking violates the University’s harassment policies that person can file a complaint with the Office of Affirmative Action where the complaint will be reviewed and the chalking erased if deemed necessary.
In order to portray chalking as a medium that encourages campus dialogue, the proposal encourages chalkers to write Wespeaks, post messages on discussion forums, discuss issues brought up by chalkings in their residence halls and chalk back in response.
Since the enactment of the ban, several students have been sent to the Student Judicial Board (SJB) for chalking and chalking related activities. According to Director of Public Safety Maryann Wiggin, Public Safety officers have been enforcing the ban as they would any other violation of University policy.
“Students referred to Public Safety for chalking have been very cooperative,” she said.
David Jay ’04 received a warning for chalking from the SJB after the Argus published a photo of him chalking. He was referred to the SJB again for chalking when a friend who doesn’t attend Wesleyan visited and chalked. Jay received ten hours of community service for his friend’s actions.
Though many students were initially apathetic about chalking, Bennet’s decision spurred them to get involved with efforts to preserve chalking on campus.
Andrew Aprile ’06 explained that he hadn’t considered chalking a relevant issue until the ban went into effect. He attempted to call attention to the ban by writing messages such as “this is not chalk” and “don’t put me in a box” on masking tape which he then adhered to campus sidewalks.
Aprile said that he got the idea from Day La Vega, an activist who used to write messages on streets of New York City on masking tape. Public Safety officers stopped Aprile and a friend for “taping.” Aprile claimed that, though both students received disciplinary action for the offense, at the time Public Safety officers told them that they wouldn’t be given an SJB referral for the violation. Aprile received five hours of community service as a penalty.
“To completely ban chalkings goes against the nature of our school,” he said. “I don’t see why a system wasn’t instituted where only specific chalkings could be removed.”
Polak agreed with the sentiment and explained that though certain chalkings did sometimes generate problems, these problems themselves began dialogue. She added that this kind of controversy and students’ previous freedom to make these statements was a large part of the unique Wesleyan environment.
Other students criticized Bennet as unable to adequately address the chalking situation.
“I don’t think that Bennet is in a position to comment on the way chalking affects dialogue considering the way he insulates himself from the campus community,” Goldstein said.