Photo Courtesy of Jozette Moses.
Sophia Ferreira-Baziotis ’23 and her floormate hung their sign first. “Coming off of the summer […] we were talking about the injustices that occurred over the summer […] thinking about ways we could show our support, […] So I wrote ‘ACAB’ and I threw a rope to [my floormate], and she and I put it outside our [rooms] during onboarding quarantine and it stayed there ever since.” It was still during onboarding quarantine, and despite the imposed physical and social distancing, multiple students in both JA and Freeman residence halls had decided to reach people in another way. What started out as one sign quickly spread. “A lot of people […] followed suit and they put really awesome signs that said […] things like ‘abolish prisons’ and ‘abolish police’ and ‘free the people’ and that was all good and people were taking pictures and it was kind of a pretty cool moment.” The moment was soon cut short, however, when the College contacted just one out of the more than four students who chose to hang signs outside of their windows. “As soon as Mika [Cook-Wright ‘22] put ‘Why is Conn only 4% black?’ then they were asked to take the signs down.”
Initially, Cook-Wright (who uses they/them pronouns) had only one sign hanging outside of their window which said “Free the people” and a Jamaican flag positioned inside the building but still visible from the outside. Only later did they add letter cutouts that spelled “Why is Conn only 4% black?” inside the window panes. After doing this, Cook-Wright said that on September 2 “my housefellow was asked to speak with me one-on-one, and told me that I needed to remove the flag.” The flag which read ‘Free the people.’ For Cook-Wright, the ask seemed suspicious. “That is not a rule that is ever enforced, as I brought up, because […] there’s always things hanging out of windows.” In response to that one-on-one, they moved the sign. “I was told that the issue was that it was physically hanging out of the window. So, […] because this is when it was hot, I raised the window up and tacked it to the inside of the window so it was like a blind.”
But the next day Cook-Wright received an email from their housefellow asking for another meeting. Now, they were told that the letters inside the window which read “Why is Conn only 4% black?” were a problem. “This whole time[…]the other signs are visible”, Cook-Wright emphasized. “The window next to me and the window two down from that and then these two girls in Freeman […] have a sign that spans both of their windows, and they weren’t talked to.”
Cook-Wright had some idea of what to expect from the College. “This is not the first time something really unfair has happened to me at this school, and I’m usually met with a lot of bureaucracy and nonsense and excuses when this happens.” So, they enlisted the help of other students who had also hung signs out of their windows.
“Apparently, the reason all this was an issue was because Dean Cardwell was walking around campus at night and only saw my window, which had a Jamaican flag also hanging in it, and it was the only window that explicitly had the word ‘Black’ in it.” Many students emailed Dean Cardwell on Cook-Wright’s behalf that same day. “Following that day of people emailing was when I received the second ‘take the other sign down'”, Cook-Wright said.
Ferreira-Baziotis was one of the students who emailed Dean Cardwell on September 2. In her email, she asked for an explanation as to why the “only student of color who had signs up” had been singled out for doing something that Ferreira-Baziotis and two other residents were also doing. Dean Cardwell responded: “I did not see your sign hanging outside the window or I would have asked you to do so as well. Please take it down. Students have a responsibility to know and abide by the College policies— not rely upon others to enforce them.” Cardwell ends the email by citing the student handbook.
Connor Busch ‘22 also emailed Dean Cardwell. Busch explained that while Cook-Wright was the only student contacted, “several of us JA residents found that really strange considering that there were signs hanging out of windows just next door. So, why was this one being targeted? Was it about Conn trying to protect its reputation?”
In his initial email, Busch “asked [Dean Cardwell] why that specific student was singled out and asked her if it had anything to do with the content. She responded by saying that the signs are not offensive and that she ‘never suggested that they were,’ which is like, not the point. I pushed her even further to acknowledge the implied racism here and she responded with, ‘I saw one student and asked to have the sign pulled inside. I did not see other signs outside windows or would have addressed those as well.'”
After more back-and-forth emailing, Dean Cardwell called Busch on his personal phone. On the call, “she explained once again that she simply did not see the other signs. I told her that I wasn’t really worried about that and that I was really just hoping that she would acknowledge the position of the student in question and perhaps apologize.”
Dean Cardwell also called Cook-Wright. “Calling students was very, very weird, and frankly incredibly unprofessional,” they explained. “People were getting calls on personal cell phones, which is something the college has the ability to do, but […] that feels really unprofessional to be calling [students] in response to an email where you are culpable and you have done something wrong.” They said Dean Cardwell did call them, but because the call came from an unknown number Cook-Wright doesn’t even remember their phone ringing. “I would wonder why Dean Cardwell couldn’t simply say ‘I’m sorry’ in an email […] I would also question the school’s use of phone calls over emails in the first place, because it seems like that was a deliberate choice to prevent having a paper trail.” Dean Cardwell declined to comment on this incident, citing concerns over student privacy.
Nine days after Cook-Wright was asked to take down their sign for the first time, they met with Dean Arcelus and Dean McKnight. They were clear going into the meeting: “from the beginning I told them I don’t actually want to hear about policy.” Instead, they wanted “to know why this is being suddenly enforced and why it’s being selectively enforced, because [as] I said there are many other students’ [signs] in the same line of sight.” Cook-Wright also was explicit that they wanted an apology. “I told Dean Arcelus and Dean McKnight in our meeting that what I would like is an apology.” According to them, the Dean’s response was in essence, “’She’s [Dean Cardwell] not gonna mean it if she apologizes.’” “That was really profoundly disappointing,” they said, “to hear from two deans of this college that their colleague was just gonna make a mistake like this and not take responsibility.”
According to Dean McKnight, both he and Dean Arcelus reached out to Cook-Wright “to have a supportive conversation.” Although Dean Arcelus was unavailable for an interview due to a family emergency, McKnight said that in the meeting “we did talk about the fact that our freedom of expression policies exist because the college doesn’t want to be in a position of making decisions about content of material that is being posted, and we used a range of different examples in our meeting.” As it is currently written the sign policy reads: “Banners, flags, neon signs, decorative lights, etc. may not be displayed in windows or on the outside of residential houses.”
For McKnight, “the reason the policy actually exists the way that it does is because some people might be supportive of the idea of hanging banners or flags or posting signs as long as it says things that they agree with. But if someone were to post or hang something that they personally found offensive, it would be really hard for the college to enforce asking them to remove it if there wasn’t a sort of standard policy across the board.” McKnight emphasized that “this policy is supposed to almost neutralize the possibility of really offensive things that are perceived by many people to be offensive” being posted.
But for Cook-Wright, insisting on discussing policy was an evasion of the problem at hand. “Something about it feels very manipulative, when I’m talking about a very specific issue to insist on making it be theoretical. It doesn’t need to be ‘imagine if this happened,’ this is what happened.”
McKnight acknowledged Cook-Wright not wanting to hear about college policy, though not their concerns about theoretical scenarios. In response to the question of why McKnight and Arcelus chose to hold a public forum on freedom of speech following their meeting with Cook-Wright, he said “for them it wasn’t about policy, it was about the statement they felt they needed to make. They weren’t actually interested in policies on freedom of expression at all, so we didn’t do it in response to that conversation.”
McKnight was part of the group of faculty and staff who designed the college’s philosophical statement on freedom of speech back in 2016 in response to active student protest against racist comments posted on Facebook by a professor in the History Department. Dean McKnight thought “it seemed to make sense, given the four year [graduation] cycle,” to have a campus discussion about freedom of speech again now that any students who might have been on-campus during that time have since graduated.
But the public forum on freedom of speech had another effect. “The way that [Dean Arcelus and Dean McKnight] have chosen to handle [this incident] has turned well-meaning Conn students away from the focus of what happened,” Cook-Wright shared. “The people I talked to that really supported me when this first happened, kind of did eat up this ‘well, I guess we can have a debate about free speech,’ [but] that’s not the issue. People are already putting stuff everywhere on campus, it’s just an issue when I did it, and no wrongdoing was admitted on anyone’s part for that.”
During that September 11 meeting, McKnight said he and Arcelus “did in fact apologize on behalf of the college that this was such an upsetting experience, that [Cook-Wright] felt targeted, that they felt that they were being kind of isolated or called out in some way.” When asked if the Deans had apologized to them: “if you would call an apology gaslighting someone, half apologizing,” they said, “then yeah, they apologized.”
Ultimately, Cook-Wright never received an apology from Dean Cardwell. Regardless of Dean Cardwell’s intent, students emphasized that racism was at play in this incident. Ferreira-Baziotis reiterated that “the picture of Mika’s window was being posted on social media, and that wasn’t a good look for the school […] As an institution we talk a lot about our diversity and our inclusion and what we work for and our values,” Ferreira-Baziotis said, “but when Conn is called out and it’s publicized, then it’s not okay.”
According to Ferreira-Baziotis, Cook-Wright’s sign “was mostly inside the windows. Rather [my floormate] and I had a huge rope with big signs that said ‘ACAB’. So it really wasn’t about being inside the windows because if it actually were about being inside the windows, and it being a fire hazard then we would have been called out first, [be]cause ours was very conspicuous.”•
