Power over the Administration

After reading an advanced copy of Professor Claire Potter’s letter to Zach Goldstein, I felt compelled to respond. I am writing this not so much in defense of Zach’s original Wespeak but out of a profound sense of disappointment in Professor Potter. In the letter, she displays a stunning lack of understanding of the politics behind chalking, the workings of power and the imperatives of the university institution. What makes this letter particularly dangerous is that it comes from an ostensible ally of chalkers. But one wonders whose interests are really articulated in her vilification of Zach.

Potter says: “Since the ban began, students have consistently chosen confrontation over compromise, a disastrous strategy that has repeatedly put them on the losing end of things.”

The claim that students have consistently acted confrontationally is simply wrong. Since the moratorium’s announcement, there have been numerous attempts to reinstate chalking through non-confrontational channels. I refer her to the WSA proposal that was drafted as a compromise, passed by the WSA twice, and subsequently rejected by President Bennet…twice. So what is Potter talking about? Bennet has shown that he has no intention of lifting the ban, no matter how hard we plea and how many hoops we jump through. If anything, the naïve hope of compromise is what has repeatedly put us on the losing end.

Potter says: “One truth about power is that sometimes it is absolute. That is a real condition in the world and has to be taken into account and made the source of creative strategy by those out of power. The president does have the power to enforce this chalking ban, whether any of us like it or not.”

Power is absolute? The president possesses power and we are out of power? And by implication, because we are powerless, we must appeal to his conscience to convince him of the rightness of our cause? I remind Professor Potter that power is not something one possesses, but something that is expressed and exercised in a social relation. It flows back and forth depending on the conjuncture.

Power means leverage. Leverage, in our situation, can come in many forms, including a humiliating newspaper article. The fact is that we do have power over the administration, if we choose to apply pressure to the most sensitive points. But Professor Potter wants us to accept powerlessness as a ‘real condition’ of our lives and to act accordingly. She pre-constitutes students as immutably powerless victims and calls for a ‘creative strategy’ of begging since, according to her script, we can hope for nothing more.

Potter says: “you haven’t got a clue how an institution runs or how it maintains itself, financially or ideologically, as a space where many different kinds of people and politics can flourish…in my view a community is a place where people work together and learn from each other—not tear each other to shreds and try to force others to submit to their will.”

Professor Potter is undoubtedly right that the University is ‘a space where many different kinds of people and politics can flourish.’ But there’s a catch: one must obey the rules of the game and agree not to ‘tear each other to shreds.’ Believe in what you will, just don’t transgress the sacred laws of liberal dialogue. Community, civility and responsibility are the goals. Consensus, compromise, and subsumption are the means. The result for students is always sublimation and subjection.

We are free to discuss whatever we want, but we can’t challenge the rituals of university life. By practicing the rules of proper behavior, whether they are rules for the classroom, sidewalk, or Wespeaks, we are being trained into good liberal subjects who are ideologically equipped to become productive citizens. Potter does nothing to challenge these liberal values and fails to see how, by buying into them, she is complicit in the reproduction of student subjection.

In her zeal to attack Zach Goldstein, Professor Potter has unwittingly articulated a disturbing politics that defends the institutional interests of the university at the expense of student empowerment and struggle. While ostensibly a supporter of chalking, Professor Potter dodges the bigger question. What is it about queer chalking that is so threatening to Wesleyan? Could it be that it expresses an intransigent refusal to be transformed into ‘good’ subjects? Could it be that the administration imposed the ban because we were already powerful enough to disrupt the ideological functioning of the institution? I think so.