You all got the email from Doug Bennet on Tuesday, Dec. 7. And you may have heard that students stayed at South College for four and a half hours until Bennet agreed to hold the forum on Wednesday (not Monday the 13, as he proposed) and mention the fact that the forum was the result of an action by over 250 students (which he did not want to include).
Another issue of contention was the question of who should receive the email. Understandably, students at South College wanted it to be sent to alumni. Why not? Shouldn’t we keep alumni informed about important events at Wesleyan?
Bennet and students finally reached an agreement: “The students and the administration are committed to sending a joint report about the current situation to the alumni by Wednesday, Dec. 15, if the text can be mutually agreed upon.”
What you may not know is that on Thursday, Dec. 9, students sent an email to Bennet asking to meet to draft this joint report, as per the agreement, and suggesting some specific times. This was the response:
Dear [student who sent the email],
Thanks for following up. Because the agreed-upon rules of the forum were broken, the administration does not plan to send any joint communication. I have asked Dean Patton to work with the elected student leadership to structure the January meeting. DB
So, no joint report to the alumni. No joint communication between students and the (top level) administration.
Never mind that there were no “agreed-upon” rules, but rather a variety of understandings as to how the forum would run. (As this was an open forum for student concerns, it would have been impossible to get all the students to agree to certain rules.)
Never mind that Bennet and the entire administration had as much time as anybody else to speak during the open mic, and could express their opinions in the meantime by standing up and/or turning around like everybody else in the room was doing. (Note that none of the administrators on stage stood up in agreement for any of the student concerns, even though this was a widely utilized expression of opinion at the forum.)
Never mind that the agreement to send an e-mail to the alumni had NOTHING to do with “agreed-upon” rules or anything that happened at the forum (see email text), but was rather in response to negotiations in South College.
If this is how seriously Bennet and the senior administrators are going to take their promises, then I think—though I hope not — that we might have problems with the ensuing “dialogue.”
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