Dear Zach,
Someone just forwarded your “Open Letter” (April 16) to me—I am truly puzzled and, for the first time in a year-long debate about speech, really ashamed of a student’s behavior. Was this supposed to be funny? Please note that I have absolutely no official standing viz. your life or career at Wesleyan, so please just consider this a comment from a (deeply) concerned faculty member.
I don’t agree with the chalking ban. But I also don’t think President Bennet is at fault for the lack of creativity students have demonstrated in evading the ban, or for finding some way to organize themselves better to promote radical speech on campus and win a majority of students to their cause. 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. They have consistently rejected true community organizing and the accountability that an organized community invokes. Neither stance would be acceptable or practical for any other group on this campus—faculty, janitors, Public Safety officers, or administrators, for that matter. Why? Because adults don’t insult each other, and each other’s family members, viciously and actually expect that a positive outcome from the exchange will be the result.
One truth about power is that sometimes it is absolute. That is a real condition in the world that 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, and the hope that somehow he can be humiliated into doing what students want, in the Argus or the New York Times, is simply childish.
May I also say that, while the President draws a salary that perhaps leaves him open to absorbing all kinds of conflict with good humor, his wife does not? Midge Bennet, like her husband, is a woman of incredible personal dignity, creativity and kindness. So is Alan Dachs for that matter, and his contributions to this University have been entirely volunteered. By attacking them in this manner, you have made yourself—and anyone associated with you in this—look the perfect idiot, and demonstrated that 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. As one of the faculty members who is more consistently on the left than not, 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.
You blew it. I think you owe Doug, Midge, Alan and the institution an apology. I am sending this to you in advance so that you have the opportunity to reply to the Argus simultaneously if you wish to do so.
queerly yours,
Claire Potter
Leave a Reply