Dear Doug,
On Tuesday, we witnessed President Doug Bennet’s impressive “discussion skills” at the student forum. Pertaining to WESU:
President Bennet failed to explain the critical dissonance between his rhetoric of “outsourcing” the station to NPR in the student interest and the abysmal lack of support for his plan. Indeed, in a prolonged exchange with one student on this point, he was essentially unable to respond in a coherent manner.
Lack of support for such a policy by those it is “supposed” to benefit is one thing; a large and vocal opposition adds quite another dimension. Yet the President discounted any opposition to his (and it is his) plan by responding that he “does not respond to pressure groups.” As if the Board of Trustee was not a “pressure group!”
Mr. Bennet—do the overwhelming majority of the student body, the Argus Editorial Board, the WESU Board, the Wesleyan Student Assembly, community members, faculty, and alumni constitute a “pressure group” to you? Or are we rather everybody and her sister—and this fact is just too inconvenient for you? Mr. Bennet uses the same disparaging and misleading terminology of “pressure groups” as his CEO counterpart in the White House, George Bush, used to discount the global anti-war movement prior to March 2003. Both have a special place in a long line of “Facts be damned!” Republicans.
Not listening to “pressure groups” of this sort is exactly what took this institution so fucking long to divest from Apartheid South Africa. This comes back to WESU; as Peter Goselin of the National Lawyers Guild in Hartford has recounted to us, “During the anti-apartheid divestment struggles in the late 1980s, WESU provided live coverage of rallies and sit-down strikes at Wesleyan, and was a real inspiration for those of us in the community who were also doing anti-apartheid work.” In the future, which is the more likely situation: that the University will encourage free speech and critical self-analysis over the airwaves of WESU, or—like it does everywhere else it can—try to stifle controversy and all things “political” that are bad for the bottom line. As Doug would say, “Don’t politicize the Academy.” It doesn’t really pay to have values, opinions, or principles.
We can’t continue to euphemize: Mr. Bennet, you lie and continue to lie to the people of this campus. Your machinations are—in this age of sophisticated public relations and “administrator-speak”- not always naked lies but rather lay in the realm of half-truths and insinuation. In a press release sent out before break, you emphasized that “no decision will be made about using program feeds from WSHU until students return from the winter break,” but that was never true and you know it. The WESU Board has had to deal with your insolence from Day 1 and only try to conserve what little of the station they can keep out of your myopic and self-serving vision for it. Yet all along you have insinuated that you were “working with” students rather than in reality against them and the community. You wrote that the (your) decision to use NPR feeds was made “after much exploration,” but please explain what other options you seriously considered. The WESU board wrote up a FAT (as in many pages and comprehensive) counterproposal that did not include any use of NPR feeds, a proposal which had to be rapidly compiled within your artificial timeframe and to which you have yet to respond in writing (i.e. explain why the Board can’t implement its own plan).
In Doug Bennet’s world, facts are convenient (or inconvenient) trivialities. Inconvenient facts or opinions are labeled “disinformation.”
Disclaimer: when Doug Bennet speaks of or for “Wesleyan,” he is referring to the Trustees and Administrators (SUITS) of this University.
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