I have never been so happy to have refused donating money to an institution.
Last night marked a fitting end to what can charitably be described as a disaster of a senior year at a university that my family has bankrupted themselves to put me through. The litany of bullshit is monotonous and sickening. First, the disaster of the university center, which we had been taught to expect so much of, and which has been a resounding disappointment. Second, the disaster of the insulting and ridiculous administrative refusal to listen to the wishes of the student body—who, I might add, are those very persons who, in large part, fund this institution. Third, the tremendous disappointment of Michael Roth as University President. I entered my senior fall having bought—hook line and sinker—the assurances of the University liaisons who promised us that the era of presidents out of touch with the needs and desires of the student body was behind us. Here was a real progressive! A student of the 1970s! We would be led now by somebody who understood and advocated the politics of the cultural left, who would listen and respond to the student body. What we received, instead, was a man who has spared no effort or verbiage assaulting students; our intelligence, our morality, our politics, our culture, our societies, our actions, and our newspaper.
I have spent this year staring aghast at an administration that has been willfully deaf to the thoughts, needs, and desires of its student constituency. Their assault on our style of life has reached a dizzying fever pitch: the elimination of Zonker Harris Day (WestCo Music and Arts Festival), Wine and Cheese, the threatened elimination of WestCo as a student-run living environment, a threatened party policy that would effectively eliminate student gatherings, the continued idiocy of a policy that bans chalking—a harmless form of communication that washes away with any and each of Connecticut’s interminable rains, etc. The list could go on for a thousand words. It should be compiled somewhere, but this is not the place.
This school has consistently and programmatically infantilized the student body. We are treated as idiots who cannot take care of ourselves, who cannot be trusted to self-regulate, who would not be capable of accomplishing academic feats without bans on alcohol and drugs. We are chastised and taken to task by members of our own student body, in the ridiculous sham that is the student judiciary board. Rather than be protected by the private security force that the University employs, we are harassed. The disdain that officers consistently show for the students is replicated in the refusal of the student body to cooperate with their perpetual and unceasing assaults on our gatherings, no matter how benign. (In the meantime, physical assaults on students seem to be increasing, and I personally have had several thousand dollars worth of personal items stolen or “confiscated” over my tenure here—none successfully recovered.)
And now, the capstone to what has turned out to be a miserably disappointing college experience: police brutality on a scale that is not only uncalled for, but unreal. And again, the administration’s monotonous refusal to listen to or advocate for the student body. I understand that a bottle was thrown at a car, and that a student allegedly assaulted an officer. The bottle was thrown, I am sure, in the context of Public Safety’s decision to shut down what had been a harmless (and not particularly loud) musical performance in the lawn between Fountain and Pine. The police were assaulted in the context of a level of student frustration that cannot accurately be expressed in words.
The fury with which the police responded against an unarmed, and largely docile, student body is atrocious. Tasers, tear gas, rubber bullets and assault dogs were unleashed with reckless and seemingly joyous abandon. It was a sickening sight to watch a k-9 unit joking and laughing as they marched their dogs towards an unsuspecting gathering. Students complying with police demands to leave the scene were gassed and shot. Students whose only crime was to stand in a backyard were brutalized by a police force that went out of control.
And yet, unsurprisingly, the University refuses to stand up for us. Surely, the WSA will, as usual, refuse to stand act on our behalf. Perhaps I can pray for discussion and meetings and fact checking. It is, I am sure, our fault that we had the audacity to stand in a backyard after midnight on the day of what was, for many of us, the last day of college.
This is, I suppose, a graduating senior’s call to the student body: it is time to start refusing. Stop complying with Public Safety’s arbitrary and disingenuous regime, stop taking the assault on student life sitting down, stop meeting and discussing with administrators who are committed to ignoring our demands. This school has become a brutal, nauseating farce of what college might be—an intellectually deadening environment of puritanical repression. Considering what we pay to attend this ridiculous institution, we have a duty to stand up for ourselves.
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