Dear President Bennet,
We are writing to address your response to Zach Goldstein that, “Because the agreed-upon rules of the forum were broken, the administration does not plan to send any joint communication” to alumni. First of all, the agreement to send a joint communication was never dependent in any way on the success or failure of yesterday’s forum. The terms to which you and the 250 or so students who assembled in your office agreed were that a joint communication to alumni would be sent if the wording of such a communication could be agreed upon. I quote the statement you made in the e-mail you sent to the entire Wesleyan campus: “The students and the administration are committed to sending a joint report about the current situation to the alumni by Wednesday, December 15, if the text can be mutually agreed upon.” To insist now that you have the right to go back on that statement merely because the forum did not go entirely as you had expected is simply in bad faith.
Second, while we are the first to acknowledge that the last thirty minutes of the forum were somewhat chaotic, we object to your assertion that we broke the “agreed-upon rules” of the forum. A group of students met at noon on the day of the forum to discuss its format, and we mutually agreed upon guidelines that were later accepted by members of the administration with whom several students conferred before the forum. One of the terms on which all agreed was that you would be given a chance to “respond.” Unfortunately for all concerned, the exact nature of this response was left unspecified, which resulted in differing interpretations and disorder. The understanding of many of the students involved was that you would be given an opportunity to give brief, specific responses to each of the issues and demands voiced by members of the community during the forum—to respond, in other words, to each of the demands as they were read off of the list. We had then planned to allow you to respond however you wished after we read our request for the proposal you agreed to present this community on January 19th. We did not give you advance notice of the fact that we would be making this request – a fact that may have resulted in your mistaken impression that we were not going to allow you to speak at all – because we wanted our question to be asked and answered in the presence of the entire Wesleyan community, not behind closed doors. Nonetheless, you were promised, and were given, an opportunity to respond, and to insist that you were “silenced” or that we broke the rules of engagement is wrong.
We have also received notice that Dean Patton intends to “work with the elected student leadership to structure the January meeting.” However, yesterday’s forum was a result of the fact that many members of this community do not feel that existing avenues for change – including the WSA – are adequate. It is unacceptable that you would bypass the voices of the hundreds of students and community members who showed up at the forum yesterday and worked so hard to bring it about in favor of yet another closed-door negotiation with the WSA.
Regards,
Bay Love, Axzyr DeLeon, Ana Weibgen, Tito Soto-Carrion, Ana Portilla and Marta Martinez
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