I see the issue of chalking at Wesleyan has become a subject for debate on campus, again. The debate is useful, since the University will undoubtedly be willing to change its policy (as it has in the past) in the face of clear and coherent arguments, and in the face of mature behavior, on the part of students.
The problem—at least in the past—was that clarity and coherence, and certainly maturity, were not what the students at Wesleyan were bringing to the debate. Instead, the students (through their chalkings) were rude, unsympathetic to any perspective but their own, and intentionally ignorant (or worse) of the impact their actions were having on the institution. Those are not hallmarks of open and fruitful debate.
It’s time for the student body at Wesleyan to accept some responsibility for its poor behavior. The reason why chalking was banned at Wesleyan was because the student body at the time proved it was unable to conduct a constructive dialogue in that particular forum. For what it’s worth, in my opinion some (not all) of the Wespeaks students write today are barely much better. They’re poorly written and poorly structured, and some students seem to think that telling their opponent in the debate to “go fuck yourself” is appropriate and advances their own cause.
Not all schools are like this, by the way. At my school (the University of Pennsylvania) there are chalkings all over the place. One fraternity, either to recruit new pledges or perhaps simply to see if it could be done, wrote out pi in chalk along the length of Locust Walk—a distance of about a third of a mile. Other chalkings have more social purpose, of course. But the administration hasn’t seen the need to ban chalkings, because the students are just more mature, and more effective, in communicating their messages.
It’s not hard to anticipate the standard response to what I’ve written above. “We don’t want to be like UPenn”; “we came to Wes because we wanted the freedom to …,” and so forth (and I’m sure someone will have a wise retort to the pointless exercise in writing out pi). Fair enough—Wesleyan is entitled to its own unique personality. Furthermore, most aspects of that personality—intense intellectual debate, open-mindedness, passion, the opportunity to shape your own education—have remained constant for decades. More recent generations of students, however, have added new dimensions to Wesleyan’s unique character—rudeness and intellectual laziness. These are recent aberrations, and the University is correct in doing everything it can to prevent them from becoming a permanent part of Wesleyan’s heritage.
You’re all going to be out in the real world soon. To put it quite simply, no one in the real world is going to put up with the crap that goes on at Wesleyan today. You’re going to learn that when you graduate, but it would be nice if you learned it before then. If Wesleyan students need help in understanding how to pursue a positive social mission and how to engage in open and vigorous debate, without the need to attack each other mercilessly, you can look to most of your peer academic institutions and observe how students there behave. Those students—and I know this is hard for Wesleyan students to accept – are just as academically rigorous, just as open-minded, just as interested in intellectual debate as you are. They just go about it in more effective, and more mature ways.
Despite the thoughts I’ve expressed above, the Wesleyan students I meet today are interesting, bright folks who can have a remarkable impact on the world. You have the opportunity to earn back the right to chalk at Wesleyan. Whether you do or not is up to you, not the University.
Leave a Reply