Bureaucracy doesn’t take root overnight. It grows slowly, desk by desk, until things just sort of run themselves, and no one can remember when all this was put in place. Point-blank, no one opts for control over freedom. Would you like your activities to be regulated and monitored? No, thank you.
The Office of Student Engagement and Leadership Education's decree. Photo by John Sherman.
The massive, public misfire of Collegiate Link has been paraded ad nauseam in front of the college community, and yet we’ve done nothing but allow our homemade banners and posters to be torn down by Jeanette Williams, crusader for needless bureaucracy, and shrink before the self-importantly inkjetted “SORRY, NO SIGNS” sign taped up behind the starkly bare Info Desk—offering, ironically, no information.
More than anything, I have to ask: Why? Why no signs? Why, at our own school, for which we pay a much-discussed, potentially much-inflated price, are we not permitted to advertise events organized and attended by us? The sign behind the Info Desk forbids vigilante signage, stipulating that space must be reserved ahead of time, through CollegiateLink. Mother, may I? How degrading.
I see absolutely no reason that the barely-functional website of the hypertitled Office of Student Engagement and Leadership Education need grant me, a student and a club leader, permission of any kind to do anything. I live here.
Student clubs at Connecticut College are autonomous by design. We don’t need faculty advisors; we only need each other. SGA allots funding to student groups by means of a Finance Committee comprised of SGA members and students-at-large, who divvy up a lump sum of available money at none but their collective discretion. At a school so professedly invested in shared governance (see also: Covenant on Shared Governance) and financially supportive of student organizations, the sort of red-tape parenting now practiced by the Office of Student Engagement and Leadership Education is not merely unnecessary, but an affront to the very independence with which we’ve been entrusted.
The requirement to reserve space in order to hang posters is at odds with the essential concept of a poster. Posters are not official announcements or administrative missives—these messages have other ways of reaching the college community, not the least of which is email. Posters are inherently guerrilla, vying for attention with loud colors and all-caps inquisitions against a flurry of competing visual noise. To what end is this being restricted?
Front wall of Cro teems with student activity. Photo by John Sherman.
At time of press, sixteen posters hang on the huge marble wall in Cro (not counting the poster forbidding posters), advertising a total of ten events, two of which have already happened, and one of which is being put on by the Office of Student Engagement and Leadership Education itself. Today alone I’ve been invited to four upcoming events via Facebook, and before the weekend I expect to be inundated with at least another dozen. The nearly bare wall opposite Cro’s fancy new doors, not to mention the entirely bare Office of Student Engagement and Leadership Education official bulletin board, belies the true activity of this student body. Oddly, the office formerly known as Student Life has masked ours entirely.
This arrangement flies in the face every new media development of our generation—Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Blogger, WordPress—which lay publishing power solely at the feet of users, rather than broadcasters. We are the users; let’s not stop broadcasting. •
Is there any communication on why this is happening? Is there something new going in place? Is this an attempt to reduce paper consumption on campus? To make the entrance prettier? How would this affect people running for student government or YAT? Can outside vendors still put up posters on the side hallway of Cro? Can you still put posters up in all other parts of campus? Do department-sponsored and student advisory board events still need permission, or is it just student groups? I’m not pleased (especially if there’s nothing in place to really promote events aside from Facebook and word of mouth…)! I was always amazed how many events were happening on any given day. Send me a note, John.
You’ve hit the nail on the head here, John. Students have no need for Collegiate Link, and thus do not make use of it. Student Engagement has taken it upon itself to coerce us into using it. The restriction of posters on the wall in Cro bespeaks a declaration of authority on the part of Student Engagement, rather than an invitation to collaboration between that office and the student body.
I for one hope Student Engagement sees room for improvement in the promotion of campus activities. The office should enable a positive student experience of campus activities, rather than a restrictive and bureaucratic system of control over student organizations.
“Cum catapultae proscriptae erunt tum soli proscripti catapultas habebunt”