Audrey Bilger Joins the Red Menake
On Wednesday, February 18, 2026 around 10pm, Reed Kommunist Shit Kollective (RKSK) members posted roughly 400 posters in various locations around campus advertising “Join the Red Menake” along with a depiction of the Reed Griffin holding a hammer and sickle, and a QR code leading to our official Reed mailing list. Several of these posters were posted on the door of Audrey Bilger’s office in Eliot Hall. At 11:06pm, a Community Safety report was filed (Arms Report #260067) which detailed that Assistant Director of Community Safety Christo Potgieter instructed that the fliers be removed due to concern about a malicious QR code. Between this time and 6am the next day, the majority of the posters in Commons were also taken down.
At 8:39am on Thursday, February 19, Dhyana Westfall ‘05 contacted the Office for Student Engagement (OSE) asking for the contact information of the RKSK signators, and at 8:51am she contacted me asking about the fliers and whether they were for a legitimate club activity. This was around the same time when I first checked my messages in the morning and realized that the posters had been removed from Commons, so there was some initial confusion about whether CSOs had removed those posters as well. I later received clarification that the posters in Commons had not been removed by Community Safety, and Westfall promptly notified future graveyard shift dispatchers that posters with RKSK insignia were legitimate, including those posted near the President’s Office. After sorting out some confusion, I am very satisfied by the response of Community Safety and feel that the rather small number of posters they removed had little impact on the club.
After it became clear that Community Safety did not remove the posters, I checked with the Facilities team who stated that they simply did not have any personnel on the clock during the time window in question, as well as a representative from the Student Life Office who also had no knowledge of the poster removal. He stated that he also did not know of any administration officials who asked for the posters to be removed, adding that doing so sounded like, to paraphrase, a waste of time and money for the college.
The posters were replaced on Saturday, February 21, and remain up everywhere except for the President’s Office, as of the time of writing. I went to the President’s Office on Monday, February 23 to meet and ask whether they took down the posters, and at that time observed that the posters were sitting on the desk of one of Bilger’s staffers. The staffer notified me that she believed the posters were for a pizza event which had already occurred. The posters did not mention pizzas, parties, or any time window. After some further discussion during which the staffer stated that this amount of posters was not allowed to be posted outside of the President’s Office, they eventually agreed to return the posters to me and said they would let others know to contact me before further altering them. I proceeded to re-post them on the wall opposite the President’s Office. By the morning of Tuesday, February 24, I observed that the posters had once again been removed, despite the agreement we had arrived at. In addition, the same morning, I noted that about one hundred posters which had been posted around Commons were removed.
At the time of writing, I am not sure as to why the posters not near the President’s Office were removed. Given that Reed is a place where posting is broadly permitted without censorship or removal, I am concerned that this was perpetuated by officials in the administration and will update the editors of the Quest if I become aware that this is the case. If students removed the posters, I am equally concerned that students feel comfortable unilaterally removing club posters and would encourage anybody who is concerned about posters to contact the party who posted them. My contact information is available in the club directory and I would have been more than happy to answer such questions.