Katherine Bascom grew up on a farm in New Hampshire, moved to Vermont, draped herself in leaves for last year’s Unlocked centerfold, and went trekking in Nepal amidst a violent populist uprising this summer. Suffice it to say, she likes adventures, the outdoors, and outdoor adventures. On Tuesday we discussed several of these topics, as well as Architecture Professor Joe Siry, the shortcomings of Barack Obama, and why academic courses at Wesleyan are becoming irrelevant.
A: You were voted most mischievous in high school. Why?
KB: I was kind of a lone wolf in high school, kind of similar to now. I floated between social groups. I’ve never had a crew. Just more of a ubiquitous presence. Yeah. Group mentalities are scary.
A: So you’re anti-crew?
KB: I’m anti-crew. I’m very much anti-crew.
A: You are a self-described student of people. Tell me about the way people make eye contact here.
KB: I think there’s a considerable amount of eye fucking going on between people. There are a lot of people that avoid contact, I don’t know if that’s more than anywhere else. Everyone recognizes a lot of faces around campus, and if you have a party in a small, confined space, a lot of people maybe just feel anxious about watching other people, or knowing other people, or admitting to knowing them. Maybe they have a lot of anxiety about confrontation—you just don’t acknowledge each other. It’s so twisted. I think a lot of peoples’ compasses spin haywire on this campus, in terms of just general decency and friendliness because we’re all so close and people try to act really aloof to other people and I have no idea why that is. Do you?
A: Well, this isn’t about me. Tell me about some of your hobbies.
KB: Farmer’s market, I help Jess [Posner] and Kennedy [Odede] with their organization doing graphic design and grant editing, and various projects with that. I do Japanese woodblock printmaking and creative writing, I did the fashion show last year. I’m a big sewer, I play club soccer, I was a Peer Adviser, I do dance and yoga.
A: You’re not so much into homework, though.
KB: It really bothers me when people put blinders on and focus solely on work for class. Because I don’t think that being here is about going to class and only doing class. It’s about all the other people that we have on campus, and cross-cultivating ideas with them.
A: You think we’re paying for the social experience, not the class time?
KB: Yeah. I just found that class doesn’t have that much to offer me. The class structure is a little outdated. I’ve gotten by in so many classes by not doing any of the reading at all, and I’ve written papers and done reading responses, without doing any of the reading. I feel like if you can do that, there’s something wrong with the course. I don’t feel like coursework here is really tied to anything relevant. Maybe that’s—I shouldn’t have been an English major (laughs). My fault, right? I’m just not gonna put blinders on and go study things in a vacuum. Therefore, I don’t do my homework.
A: You do all this printing and stuff instead.
KB: I do projects. I’m really into projects. So right now, you know,, I have my farmer’s market project and I also, this past weekend went to Vermont to go to a food politics conference. I do projects for Jess, I find that work a lot more rewarding than getting any sort of paper written for class—you know helping edit a grant that’s actually being submitted to a fellowship program that could potentially bring a lot of publicity and support to an organization that’s actually gonna do something.
A: So college should be about doing something?
KB: Yeah, yeah. I mean how many community service learning classes are there? Five? Maybe every class should be a community service class? Maybe every class should have some sort of project that they do.
A: You think it’s effective to force kids to go out into the community?
KB: I don’t think people are going to pursue community service—you have to make an incentive for people to do good. Because most people won’t do it. So if their incentive is to get a good grade, to get a degree from Wesleyan, yeah, maybe. Maybe that would work. Maybe that would get more done.
A: Gianna Palmer tells me you’ve seen cows slaughtered. You saw their throats cut and stuff?
KB: Yeah, many a cow, many a friend. Everyone should know where their food is coming from. My Dad and our farm hand did the deed.
A: How do you think Obama’s doing?
KB: Terrible! I saw in the news today, he just signed on to build two more nuclear power plants. Asinine decision for our future generations. They are okay if they’re run perfectly. We don’t run things perfectly—humans don’t run things perfectly. I don’t think we can be trusted with nuclear power. The thing that’s really scary is that I saw this map of nuclear fallout since the 1940s, studying wind patterns and where nuclear fallout happened, and it shows it all across the U.S., and there was especially heavy fallout in the Champlain Valley in Vermont. That’s really frightening. You test in one spot it goes everywhere. What kind of recipe for disaster is this? A really big one.
A: So you don’t like the nuclear power plants. What about everything else?
KB: I am a fan of Michelle Obama. I think she should be dictator. Maybe we should have a dictatorship, and we’d get things done. I feel like Obama’s pussyfooting around.
A: Why do you like Professor Joe Siry’s classes?
KB: It’s like a field trip every class. He has a great sense of humor and I like the way that he presents the information, kind of like a take it or leave it kind of way, and I take it all (laughs).
A: Does he favor any schools or cities or types of architecture?
KB: Renzo. Doesn’t he like Renzo a lot? And Calatrava? I couldn’t really tell. I was meaning to go into his office and chat with him all semester, but I never made it.
A: Any shout outs to your fellow WesCeleb Rose Agger ’10?
KB: I was just thinking about following in her footsteps with this. The last time we were mentioned in similar print form was on the ACB—someone said who are the “Summer Winners” junior year. It was like Katherine Bascom and Rose Agger.
A: “Summer Winners?” What’s that?
KB: I don’t know. It was like right after we got back from summer. We won in the summer. I don’t know.
A: Did you take that as a compliment?
KB: Yeah! Because Rose is awesome.
A: What are you going to do here before you leave?
KB: I would like to start a wider conversation about food politics on campus. I’m working on that right now. I would like to throw some raucous parties. Bonfires. I would like to meet as many people as I can before I leave. Yeah, that means a lot to me. There’s a ton of underclassmen I don’t know yet. I’d like to win the X Prize—that would be cool. I want to just do as much as I can.