Last weekend was my first homecoming weekend at Wesleyan. And although I anticipated that there would be a lot of activities going on throughout the weekend to entertain the numerous parents, siblings, alumni, grandparents etc, I hardly expected the transformation that would take place throughout campus in an attempt to appease these spectators. In short it all seemed like we were putting on some kind of show, where not only was there an overwhelming sense of campus pride, but even the food we ate seemed a little less bland and a bit easier on the stomach. “The improvement in Mocon was a good thing,” Himanshu Suri ’07 said. “It was just too nice,“ Yokasta Tineo ’07 said. ”It should be that nice for us all the time.”
In truth, this was not the first time that I had seen Wesleyan make itself over in attempt to flirt with outsiders who still maintain an idealistic vision of the University. I was here last spring for Students of Color Weekend and Wes Fest and during the four days that I lived out of basement room in Nicholson. I was swept up in all the protests and demonstrations, the students camping out in front of Olin, the “dying canaries,” the pamphlets being distributed about white privilege and the admissions statistics over the past ten years, and perhaps most importantly the midnight chalking. All of this commotion for a hot-headed little Haitian girl from Brooklyn inspired a certain amount of pride for a University that I thought was brimming with radicalism and that was angry at the world for not giving them everything they thought they deserved.
Perhaps (fortunately) this was not the Wesleyan I stumbled upon late this August. However what I do think is important to consider is the idea that as a University there is an image of ourselves that we project to the public and that in certain cases we use to lure in potential buyers. Are we then responsible for upholding that image? Is it all right to clean up whenever “company” comes over, despite the dirt and dust that’s simply been pushed under the bed?
“It was a total show,” Jacklyn Cruz ’07 said. “Wesleyan is not all about football games and bar-b-que sets on the back of trailers.” “The students didn’t know about a lot of things that were going on for the weekend,“ Melissa Mondesir ’07 said.
What I think is also important to look at is what image we choose to represent. If we want outsiders to look to us as a diverse, eclectic, liberal arts university and then we, (for example purposes only), ban chalking, which has for many years been a widely used medium of expression, what are we really saying about what freedom of expression means to us? It seems as though there are student—and I would assume facult—ho came here thinking this was a very different place. These students then found themselves two or three years later unsatisfied because what they were looking for was perhaps only a façade.
This is not to say that this is all simply an issue of the Wesleyan administration and that students and their organizations have deceived themselves and others into believing in their own masks. However, administratively, the University is much more visible to outsiders.
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