Two days ago, I joined members of SJP to unfurl banners with messages of Palestinian solidarity at a Wesfest event. President Roth somehow spun our demonstration into another pitch for Wesleyan’s embrace of democratic learning and Roth’s own magnanimity. Afterwards, an individual told me that they were impressed by the fact that Roth had invited us to be there. He did not. President Roth would have you think that we are all chummy. We are not. The position of student activism at Wesleyan is one that challenges the power of the institution, but is simultaneously essential to Wesleyan’s institutional identity and economic viability. They can’t live with us, but they can’t live without us.
This has been a consistent pattern. Argus writer Akhil Joondeph discovered this 2016 student quote from Chris Gortmaker in the Wesleyan archives: “The University will try to commodify our protest to contribute to their brand of ‘Diversity University.’ We’re telling the people we’re talking to that [the University] will try this, and that we’re doing this not to contribute to this brand, but to operate in spite of it and against it.”
University policy does not necessarily promote the sort of learning environment of which Roth so proudly takes ownership. In fact, it often blocks it. Take for example the Israeli Apartheid Wall. Students requested permission to construct the wall (built out of cinder blocks, wood frames, and stretched canvas) as they have done for many years. With the permission granted by a dean, students constructed the wall at 9pm. By 3 in the morning, public safety had torn the canvas off of the wall. Thankfully, after demonstrating that the students had permission, Public Safety apologized and helped reconstruct it. Still, there is no doubt in my mind that the wall’s removal had to do with its political content—as the sun rose the next morning, a structure remained, but only the words and images were gone! This nips in the bud any argument that perhaps the wall was defaced for issues of access or some broadly and equally enforced policy. We see time and time again with chalking as well—chalk scrawls with political messages are lost to the power washer, while innocuous hopscotch and the persistent “I love you” remain.
Not to burst the bubble, but Roth, you’re not our friend. Over the past several months, you have made it very clear that you care much more about your “fiduciary responsibility” than any sort of collaborative movement towards social justice. I am glad that you spoke out against neutrality and complicity. But let me tell you something. You’re already complicit. We’re all already complicit. And we’re all already non-neutral! Universities cannot be neutral spaces. I am not saying this as a value judgment, it is simply factual: Wesleyan university is NOT politically neutral and never has been. Just ask any Middletown resident bought out of their house, or kid locked up in the Connecticut Juvenile Training School, which was built in part with the 16 [million dollars] that Wesleyan paid to the state to purchase the Long Lane parcel because it wasn’t a good look to be next to a youth prison (Instead, the prison can move down the road on our dime). This is the world we inherit. It is a world in which neutrality is simply not an option because it does not exist. There is no view from nowhere.
But here’s what I want to stress. We don’t have to be morally pure. We do not have to exist without hypocrisy. We can’t. We don’t have to have some master plan for fixing the world. We shouldn’t. Organizing and activism are not a static thing, but a perpetual ritual process of doing and thinking, doing and thinking. It is an embrace of our position, our own inherent political-ness, our own impurity, and a REFUSAL to let that be the end. Please allow me the privilege of quoting an academic article. This is from “Against Purity” by Alexis Shotwell (shoutout to the Anthropology Department).
“(This book) is ‘against purity’ rather than for any of the many things that I am indeed for because precisely one of my imperatives is to be against without predicting all the things there are to be for. Being against in this way—having a ‘no’—involves also the Zapatismo invocation of the possibility of ‘many yesses.’ In this sense, I am allied with John Holloway’s conception of ‘the scream.’ As he says, this is our starting point, this ‘rejection of a world that we feel to be wrong, negation of a world we feel to be negative’ (Holloway 2010, 2).”
We can say “no,” here and now. We can say, “slow down.” We are ALL implicated in worlds and war machines. We’re not asking for the perfectly utopic world, we’re not asking for a quick and easy way for Wesleyan to “wipe our hands clean.” We’re just asking for a world where critique is not some dichotomized moral battle, but a generative process of mending and substantive action. We’re asking for a world where we can say “No. This is not how we want to exist.”
President Roth, you too understand the moral messiness of the world. You tell us about it often. But when you say “this is just the way things are,” or “it’s more complicated,” or “you don’t understand how investment banking works,” I think that’s just a way of getting the final word. “This is just the way things are” is a defeatist, disorganizing sentiment which does not contribute critically to an evolving, reflexive movement. How about we say “this is how things are” and ask “Why do they have to be this way? What formed them this way? What are we all doing here? What can change?” You do not use moral messiness as a point of departure. For you, it is the end-all be-all. It is the final destination. You use that logic to drown out student voice. Roth, for a very long time you have mocked student activists. You have condescended to us and told us that you, too, were once young and full of hope. Now you know better, now you know how the “real world works.” You delegitimize our asks again and again without coming to the table and trying to set aside your own ego.
Is it really that ridiculous of an ask to examine how Wesleyan makes money? Or even the simple fact that Wesleyan makes money, operating as a corporation? At Wesleyan, investment operates like this: the board and president create policy, which the investment office must adhere to. But the investment office isn’t even doing the investing! No, they hire and fire investment banker contractors. According to the Wesleyan investment office, their current best “line of defense” against unethical investing is hiring only investment contractors which they deem to be “morally upstanding.” When Roth and the board tell us that they don’t know what we’re invested in, that’s probably not a lie! The bankers have complete agency on the ground, and the investment office here only gets the quarterly reports. Why am I telling you this? So that you understand that I understand that the call to divest is complex… until it’s not. Until you start interrogating: why are there so many layers of removal from the bomb that ends a bloodline? This allows the reality of our inherent complicity to be shrouded by layered stratus clouds of technical language. It’s disorganizing to come up against these mechanics of money which are so boring, so banal. Living in this world, we are footing the bills of massive death and destruction. American tax dollars pay for the weapons contracts which make companies lucrative for investment opportunity. Those investments pay for our schooling. This is the way it is, but not just the way it is.
Which is why I invite us all now to bring in our primordial scream of dissent. The “no” which can wedge open a space for “many yesses.” Feel the total fact of moral impurity, the weight of uncertainty, the grief of so many lives lost, and many more lives preserved but irreparably shattered by a world system which clings to militant nationalism and is built on the profit derived from difference.
Growing up in a Jewish community grappling with Zionism, I was scared of slogans like “from the river to the sea,” and “free Palestine.” I was scared about what anti-Zionism or post-Zionism meant or looked like. Now I know that when my friends and I chant it together here, it is nothing less than that radical dissent which gestures at a world where we might all become more liberated. So please feel today. Feel the discomfort of an activism which refuses to play into the university brand. Chant and scream and feel and ask for a new way of being.
Zoe Hecht is a member of the class of 2026 and can be reached at zhecht@wesleyan.edu.