Letter to the Editor: On Graffiti

Dear Presidential Climate on Campus Climate, Editors of the Quest, and the Reed Student Body,

On Friday, we were all notified about the new restriction on graffiti in communal bathrooms on campus. I have several issues with this policy itself, as well as the reasoning and motivations behind it. However, in the interest of a constructive conversation, I would like to suggest an alternative policy and process that I wish were implemented instead. 

Instead of an outright prohibition of graffiti, Reed’s first step should have been to create a venue where all members of the community could gather to discuss the issue of hate speech graffiti when it first began to emerge in 2023. In my mind, this is the intended purpose of Reed Unions. Still, our community has fallen out of the practice of having them, so I understand why this was not the first step taken. I have several criticisms of the steps taken, but I will address them later.

I think that there is no reason to take any policy action beyond removing hate speech as it appears, but if a change needs to be made, I suggest a different policy than prohibiting graffiti: to close the library and other spaces to the general public by requiring swipe access at all times. While we cannot know specifically who was writing hate speech on the walls of our beloved buildings, a more appropriate first step is to see if the people writing these things actually have an attachment to Reed, or if they are simply ne’er-do-wells causing trouble by writing hateful things in spaces to upset us all. 

Many people, including myself, suspect that the individuals writing these messages on walls are outsiders to our community. If this is the case, then you have given them what they wanted: to make all of us scared of each other, and give them more space on the walls to write their hateful remarks.

In addition to these concerns, I also think that many students have begun to question the openness of our campus in the face of the violence that is occurring around us. I have had my own experiences where I wished that a space on campus could not be accessed by someone just walking through so that I could keep myself safe. I am confident that I am not alone in this sentiment. 

Assuming I am correct in my hypothesis that the perpetrators of this hateful vandalism are not from the Reed community, then the openness and trust we have held for the greater Portland community have been abused. This is what is most contributing to the harm that the new graffiti policy seeks to address. Curtailing public access to these buildings would also be a suitable response to this kind of abuse, as it restricts the party I assume to be responsible—the general public, not students. Requiring swipe access into these community buildings would be a good first step to begin to feel physically safe on campus again, and it is reasonably easy to implement because the library and GCC already lock after business hours. Allowing graffiti in the first place is not the problem, so banning it cannot be the solution.

If I am proven wrong in my hypothesis, then I believe that we have better tools at our disposal than simply banning graffiti. I believe that when harm like this occurs, it is an opportunity to find support in the community around you. Work needs to be done to address those harmed to minimize the lasting effects of that harm. These occurrences should strengthen our community by bringing us together, not chip away at the community we have built here. I also believe that the people perpetuating the harm need to be appropriately sanctioned, and an attempt should be made to dissuade an individual from their harmful beliefs by people with the right resources to be effective at this persuasion. Simply removing the ability to express hateful sentiments only ignores the problem; it does not address it.

The anonymity of these acts troubles me, and I fear that any serious attempt (like placing cameras in GCC facing the bathrooms) to successfully locate the individual(s) responsible for this hate speech would necessitate an infringement of student privacy. But I do not think that these serious attempts would lead to catching the perpetrators. Ultimately, hateful vandalism in a bathroom is very easy to carry out anonymously and is, I fear, inevitable given today’s sociopolitical climate. Our response to this, however, cannot be to take away freedoms from all students; it should be to help those who have been harmed in whatever ways they ask for and are reasonable to provide, and to find ways of proactively reducing harm without restricting student freedom.

I also think that this policy change has been fundamentally reactionary in nature, by being driven by “the need to do something” so that the college does not get into trouble with the federal government. I would like to remind us all that complying in advance does not get those who oppose what Reed stands for to back down. It only emboldens them to take further and more extreme action. History bears this understanding out in both the distant and recent past.

I would also like to note that this is not the first time that some part of the college administration has sought to proactively address problems in ways that go against our community values. In the fall of 2023, Housing Advisors were made to do rounds despite their numerous and reasonable objections including, but certainly not limited to, the fact that CSOs already undergo the same safety checks approximately nine times a day, there was no additional pay for this extra work and the risks involved, and there was no clear understanding of what rounds entailed until people actually had to do them. Again, the college administration made a reactionary decision about a change that “needed to happen,” ignoring student concerns rather than taking a principled approach that would have led to an outcome that everyone was okay with from the start.

At the same time, college administrators added an additional clause to our housing contract that mandated uniform quiet hours on campus. Still, no one was notified about this change to the agreement. Before this clause, each residential community could discuss amongst themselves the quiet hours that worked best for them, if they wanted to have any at all (usually people did; though Reedies may be anarchic, we still like our sleep).  

I have seen this in countless other ways as well, from the banning of Brawl Ball to the change in the Honor Principle, such that administrators are now immune from being brought to the Honor Board because of their actions. Making decisions about these issues is a tricky balancing act; my experience with administration has not been about balancing the concerns of all, but rather, I have found that administrators create a hierarchy where they are in charge. Everyone else is free to agree or disagree as much as they want, but the administration's wishes are what will happen one way or another.

These actions are not those of a community that believes in the value of group decision-making, where every voice is heard, and holds those accountable who do harm. In fact, they have stopped or gone directly against those community values that administration drones on about in their many emails to the general Reed body.

This is a serious problem for our community that must be addressed by all of us by discussing it together rather than have a group of administrators decide for the whole community. An administration's job is to do just that, administrate the college— organize class schedules, maintain course requirements, keep a budget, and even enforce community rules. What an administration's job is not (despite what the Reed and federal administrations might wish) is to make the rules for everyone else to follow. That is our collective responsibility, and as the Reed Community, we may decide that a working group of concerned individuals is the best way to go about that. Still, that decision must come from the community we find ourselves in, rather than from the minority of people who rarely spend time in a classroom or talking with students who make up the majority of the Reed Community.

When I heard that Reed is a place that values community engagement and governance, I expected to find a place that was full of fruitful discussions about the problems faced by the college and as a society. Regrettably, I have found that instead Reed advertises one thing and does another. 

Their hypocrisy has created an environment where students are not empowered to make decisions about our community, like we were promised in the mailer, quickly leading to  disenchantment with the institution as a whole and disengagement from the places that students are supposed to go to have their voices heard (like Senate or the Quest). I believe the best example of this is the growing difficulty in reaching a quorum to elect Senate representatives. My hypothesis of the cause (pushes up glasses as a political science major) of this conundrum is that all the students of Reed understand that administrators prop up Senate as their “student input” to any decisions made. I think that we, the students, see through this ploy quite easily. When we do, we are already so disaffected about changing this institution that we do nothing about it. This needs to change.

I will note here that in case you haven’t noticed, our federal government does a very similar thing with those elected officials who are supposed to represent us in our actual government as well. They claim to be working for the common person, yet all they do is legitimize the wishes of the powerful instead. If only someone had written about this earlier…

Anyway, speaking as someone who sat with and laid out reasonable arguments for the things that HAs wanted at the bargaining table, the administration never seriously responded to what I had to say or the reasonable points I raised. Instead, I was belittled, infantilized, and my points were ignored. I can easily imagine administrators continuing this type of behavior with senators in their respective settings. 

While their suggestions may be taken, from what I have heard from former senators, the most common action taken with senators' suggestions is merely hearing them, and nothing more. The points raised go in one ear and out the other because they do not align with the administration's understanding of this college or their goals for what they want Reed to become.

This assertion of power by the administration is just an illusion. They only hold as much power as the rest of the college allows them to have. I would posit that staff, faculty, and students have all relinquished a significant portion of their power, knowingly or unknowingly, and one step at a time, to lead us where we are today. We, the people who actually enact the primary function of the college, need to take back the power to govern ourselves. We need to stop letting an administration that we rarely see or interact with (as students) make decisions about the rules we live by.

Some readers might already agree with my point of view, or convinced of the validity of my view so far, but I believe that it is also important to point out that there is a reason we are led to believe that these kinds of contradictions are okay or nonexistent, namely, the effect that subjective power (particularly in this case liberal subjective power which is the belief in institutions proper functioning regardless of the truth of that proper functioning) has affected our minds and thrown us all into a prism of unreality where Audrey can call for a “Presidential Council on Campus Climate” which eliminates student freedom without so much as a poll going out to the student population to understand the problem and how to best address it. This authoritarian style of governing is called community-driven in the liberal unreality. It’s not, and we all, Audrey included, need to stop bullshitting ourselves that it is. 

Community governance is hard. As an HA who tries to embody this value to the best of my ability, trust me, I have had my share of difficult times maintaining it as my first principle. However, it looks like talking to people as you see them and setting time aside to have hard conversations—not making a council of administrators, with faculty and students sprinkled in to serve as a participatory veneer to make decisions that, quite frankly, have nothing to do with them. I doubt most administrators are in the GCC much; meanwhile, students spend significant amounts of time in these buildings and they serve as the background to many new life experiences as we are on our journey of becoming. 

Governing through community agreement is difficult work, but it is essential to our founding mission of educating young adults in body and mind. After all, colleges are meant to be the testing grounds for different kinds of institutions and a training ground for students to understand how a government should work without the constraints that governing several million people requires. Right now, Reed is just like every other college, and it is training students to passively accept authoritarian policy formations instead of standing up for themselves or offering an alternative to the current governance structure. I hope that we are all beginning to understand the importance of community governance as a lived principle, rather than an abstract concept that lets some guy over there tell me what I can and cannot be doing because, according to him, I am ruining society.

Anyways, now that I have written a short essay on my assessment of Reed College’s failings, I’m off to do all that thesis work that I have been ignoring.

See you in the funny papers,

Eli Rall (they/them)

URCHA Steward

Political Science major

Hopefully Mildly Interesting Writer