A Wesleyan Student's Perspective
On various blogs and forums that have been linking to Wesleying over the past day, I've seen tons of discussions with hundreds of comments. The overwhelming trend seems to be to say "Awwww, poor spoiled Wesleyan students; they can't listen to authority" and to mock the Wesleyan students' "fighting for the right to party." These comments appear on the Courant website, on a Williams blog, on SomethingAwful forums - all over.
I'd like to offer an alternative perspective, which should represent only myself (Madeline, Wesleyan '09) and not Wesleying as a whole or the entire Wesleyan student body. This perspective is especially directed at individuals coming from outside the Wesleyan community who are less familiar with campus:
Tension about police brutality has been brewing on the Wesleyan campus for a while. Issues came to a head last year about racial profiling on campus, but died down over the summer. With the Sean Bell case coming to the fore a few weeks ago, questions about police brutality and racial profiling were again brought into everyday campus dialogue. So when events on Fountain Ave exploded the other night, pre-existing tensions boiled over and students got angry.
The "wild, unruly" party on a "public street" actually took place on Fountain Ave., which is comprised entirely of Wesleyan-owned student houses for seniors. The two nearby streets, Pine and Warren, with which Fountain houses share yard space, are also both comprised entirely of Wesleyan-owned student houses. So the claim that it's terrible for students to be making so much noise at 1 am is fairly unfounded, since Thursday, May 15th was the last day of final exams, and the vast majority of Wesleyan students were ready to celebrate - especially on these streets, which are entirely inhabited by Wes seniors.
The incredibly frustrating thing is that the "incitement to riot" danger occurredonly after police arrived. The most gruesome violations which cyberspace seems to be complaining about were not a cause, but rather a result of the police presence.
One of the major reasons students were in the streets was because the houses on the street holding parties were told they couldn't allow anyone else into their houses. On the last day before the semester ends and everyone leaves for the summer, and underclassmen won't see their senior friends again, students aren't going to just go home and go to sleep at 1 am. If students aren't allowed to go into student houses for parties, they start to congregate in the street. This is just poor crowd control, and the result should have been expected. This seems to be what initially started problems from last night.
The Wesleyan student body is certainly not defending the actions of belligerent drunks. There is almost universal agreement that students who know they get belligerent when drunk, obviously should not get drunk. There is also almost universal agreement that students who are belligerent drunks are responsible for their own actions, especially if they verbally abuse or physically abuse any other people, including but not limited to police officers. No one is defending the right of students to throw beer bottles at police cars (though the students who are alleged to throw beer bottles at police cars say they didn't.)
It seems highly unlikely that the police's primary actual goal was dispersal - initially sending 10 police cars created a spectacle that actually drew more people, most of whom wanted to try to figure out what was going on. There have been various other incidents involving Middletown police, some of whom seem to have some kind of vendetta against Wesleyan students. I point out this Argus article from earlier this semester, which highlights some of the cases a particular officer, Officer Clark, has been allegedly involved in. (He wrote a Wespeak in response to defend himself against the negative claims.) Again, this is just poor crowd control. Additionally, many students who weren't right nearby the loudspeaker say they couldn't hear the requests for dispersal that, according to police, were made thirty-forty minutes before more extreme action was taken - but students disagree that this timeline is accurate.
Some of the resentment coming from the Internet seems to be targeted at Wesleyan students because they are privileged. Wesleyan students are stereotyped as having "rich mommies and daddies" who they can come crying to whenever something goes wrong (for example, they're tased/bitten by a K9 dog/shot with rubber bullets/pepper sprayed). However, while certainly many students do come from privileged backgrounds, there is a hugely diverse population here. Students come from all kinds of geographic, ethnic, racial, and class backgrounds. There is certainly a general trend within higher education that students from more privileged backgrounds are more likely to attend college. This is a problem, and one that Wesleyan students, administration, and faculty are deeply committed to reducing. Wesleyan students and faculty are both deeply committed to reducing inequality, especially in education, and to maintaining a need-blind admissions policy. One of Wesleying's own founders, Holly, just finished her senior thesis analyzing the role of class and cultural capital in college admissions.
In conclusion, Wesleyan students are college students. They like to learn, they like to participate in intellectual discourse, and at the end of the day (or the semester), they like to hang out with friends and perhaps even - gasp - throw a party. But perhaps more so than at many other colleges, they are also deeply committed to both social justice and serving the larger local & global communities. The events from last night are not just about students being upset about a party being busted, or their friends being tased (though they're certainly upset about that, too). Students are upset about the larger issues of police brutality, and the use of excessive force when it is unnecessary. The breakup of the party on Fountain obviously doesn't compare in scale to the cases of Rodney King or of Sean Bell, but similar issues are brought to the fore in both cases. How much should we trust the discretion of authority, and should we do so blindly? When is violence a legitimate reaction by authority to perceived threats? Is a previously-not-out-of-hand campus party cause for shooting an entire crowd of hundreds of students in the face with pepperballs? Is a drunk man accidentally hitting an unmarked police car - and his being black, oh no - cause for shooting him to death? Obviously the scope of these two cases is very different, and in this particular Fountain party, there are no reports of racial profiling. But police are supposed to protect and make people feel safe, and in both these instances, police represented the threat and not the solution. My plea is that you please understand that this is not a simple case of spoiled students who only want to "fight for their right to party."
Wesleyan students don't want to be divided from Middletown residents on this issue. We don't want non-Wesleyan Middletown residents to bear the brunt of police violence; we want police violence to end. But we're part of Middletown, too, and just because we aren't living here permanently doesn't mean we aren't deeply invested in the community. Please give us the benefit of the doubt here. We don't think all police are stupid, and we don't think Middletown residents are stupid. We just think violence is not the solution to all problems... especially the non-threatening problems.
71 comments:
I appreciate your effort to put out the student perspective, but what's your perspective? Don't I remember you posting "xue all of us sitting here in haslab are sitting here refreshing the page" while the liveblogging was going on?
What I don't get is why, after being asked repeatedly by police to leave, the students didn't leave? The sight of large numbers of police with dogs and guns is generally a good indication that it's time to mosey on home. Or was everyone too shitfaced to act with a shred of common sense?
you say this is only your perspective, but by the end you repeatedly try to speak for all of us.
3:34: My perspective is of a Wesleyan student who was up late writing an overdue paper in HasLab who was still affected by what happened - as was everyone on campus.
3:39: From what I understand (I wasn't there), many students started showing up because they were curious about what was going on. Also, this is why PSAFE should be responding to these situations instead of the Middletown police; PSAFE understands that on the last night, after they've finally finished all their stressful finals, and before all the undergraduates have to leave campus by noon the next day and never see the seniors again, students aren't just going to go home and go to sleep at 1 am. They will look for another party to go to. Expecting students to "mosey on home" is just... unrealistic. Students have also been reporting that they didn't hear the orders for dispersal.
3:49: Sorry. I didn't mean to do that. I have a horrible tendency to speak in "we's" which is why I put my disclaimer at the beginning; this is *my* understanding of how Wesleyan students feel, which is certainly not actually representative of how Wesleyan students really feel. Again, this is poor on my part. I won't go back and edit it, though, since it's already published and responded to. If you have a different perspective, I highly encourage you to post it here.
Anon 3:39, the general sentiment was- and still is- that we had not done anything wrong. This was a party just like any other party we have on fountain. we were not a "riot" until they came and labeled us a "riot." why would we leave when we haven't done anything wrong? Therefore, if anything was a problem, the presence of the police was a problem. Numerous people called 911 because we were in danger and it was the police who were endangering us. Personally, I was tired as shit and was making myself stay out just to make that point- that we had not done anything wrong.
why would we leave when we haven't done anything wrong?
this sums up the absurdity of a lot of the student response to this event. if you're going to criticize the police (as you certainly should) you need to own up to what you did wrong. of course the response was unwarranted, but many wesleyan students were acting like idiots.
when the police tell you to disperse, you fucking disperse. anyone who doesn't understand this has been leading a ridiculously sheltered existence. you were on public property and laws were being violated. you were not involved in a meaningful protest. you were at a party.
the idea that people called 911 to be protected from police whose orders were not being followed is just...
As someone who was there, I very much appreciated this post. Thank you.
As someone who was not there, I appreciated this post as well.
"when the police tell you to disperse, you fucking disperse."
That is in itself part of the issue! Don't you understand? Amid all the chaos of the people, the cop cars, and many students on the sidewalk, it was hard, if not, close to inaudible to hear what they were telling us from certain parts of the street. The confusion results from the fact that it was NOT OUT OF CONTROL. Yes, we were partying, yes we AREN'T supposed to be in the street, but it was completely preposterous that 12 cop cars were needed to stop a fucking party. And then when they started shooting, everything just got ridiculous.
I also agree that this is a good post and am glad that it was posted.
ok, from a personal safety perspective, it is definitely a good idea to disperse when 8 police cars show up and order you to disperse. but, generally speaking, if you are not breaking the law, you shouldn't be yelled at, ordered, and roughed up by police officers, no matter your race, your income, or any other factor. labeling students as spoiled and painting the incident or the cause as trivial hides a certain truth, which is that police officers are supposed to preserve citizens' safety, and are not supposed to violently break up peaceful groups of people.
Look, this comment won't be popular, so I'm just going to say it: some Wesleyan students are acting like elitist, liberal children. Do you really think you're above the law? You would think that as educated people you would realize that a CITY street is not your personal playground. I applaud the Middletown Police Department for a great job. After veiwing the students own photos posted on the Wesleyan website, more students should have been arrested and held on bond. I hope the university will take some action against those students involved and expell them.
"But they're infringing on my personal space!" Bullshit, they're cops. Their job is to maintain order, now listen to liberal hippies complaining that the power of the state is infringing on their alcohol dependencies. You should all grow up. Hopefully you won't be quite such libertarian nutjobs when you enter the real world. I guess I'm one of the few Wesleyan students who is embarrassed by the actions of my selfish peers.
Not that I think noise was the issue, there are non-students living on Fountain and Warren.
Don't the cops have more important things to do than to break up parties that are disturbing no one?
One point that keeps getting ignored: there have been several parties much bigger than this, this year. What made this one such a threat to the public good that police felt they needed to violently break it up?
anon 5:07
the issue of whether or not the students had "the right" to be on the street or whether the police had "the right" to tell people to get off the street is moot at this point. There are multiple points of view, and ultimately, they don't address the main issue:
the majority of the people who were hit with pepper spray, rubber bullets, etc were NOT on the street. as this post explained, people filed out of their homes to see what was going on when this began happening. These people, along with the MAJORITY of the people present on fountain avenue were on sidewalks or yards of homes, NOT the street. when the police began reacting, they not only thought it necessary to violently attack those who were on the street (the legitimacy of which could be argued indefinitely) but attacked people WHO WERE NOT on the streets - innocent bystanders who were in no way not complying with the demands of the police. i personally saw the police officer with the paintball gun full of pepper spray shooting onto the sidewalk, onto the front yards of homes. THIS is the issue, more than anything, that cannot be legitimized in ANY way and truly needs to be addressed.
mad, work on your essay.
Some posters are alluding to the fact that Fountain Avenue is Wesleyan property. It is in fact not. It is a public street.
Our students that got arrested were white males; otherwise the police would be accused of racism and sexism. Has anyone thought that perhaps they did not arrest women and minorities to avoid such accusations? Arresting white males would be “safe” arrests. Perhaps white male students should protest reverse discrimination. It all madness!
hahaha, you wrote an essay AFTER finals week
it doesn't matter why the police wanted the party to be dispersed... from what i heard, psafe called the police for help. what matters is that the students didn't listen. being too shitfaced or loud to hear the cops isn't a legitimate reason not to comply with the law -- or whatever they say is the law, for that matter. if a cop is shouting at you with a megaphone, you make an effort to find out what he's saying, even if you can't understand it initially. the circumstances surrounding this issue, including whether or not the cops should have been there, is debatable; the fact that the students acted like idiots is not, and this undermines any argument we could have against the police. if a party is so out of control that it requires 10 patrol cars and riot tactics to disperse, it deserves to be dispersed. this whole incident is absolutely disgusting.
8:07: you are conflating cause and effect. 10 police cars arriving and riot tactics doesn't mean that the party was necessarily out of control. It means that 10 police cars and riot tactics were used; was the party so out of control that it deserved it? That's the key question, isn't it?
It seems to me that the party was not at all out of control, and not any more out of control than a typical Wesleyan party (which is, in itself, probably less out of control than parties at most colleges) until the police arrived.
I can't find the link, but I read one report that said a girl was trying to find out what was said in the loudspeaker, and asked another nearby cop, and he told her to "fuck off." I might be misquoting; I wish I could find the link.
Still, the recently posted video makes me sad. It definitely portrays some students as belligerent drunken assholes. I would have hoped better from them. (I'm not saying this excuses the police - especially their actions before this video was shot)
Maybe the kids at this school need to learn to respect authority more. Not everything needs to be a liberal philosophical debate. If a cop tells you to do something, just do it. Nine out of ten times, cops are doing their jobs and have the community's best interest at heart. Stop being whiny elitist pricks.
Yeah, you wesleyan types think about things way too much! i can't stand it!
(this is 8:07)
mad - that's a good point, but how can a party get out of control because of the police? i can only see two possibilities: either the party was out of control before the police arrived but was made manifest by the act of trying to control it, OR, the students were so belligerent that the presence of police incited the disobedience. in either case, the students are in the wrong, not the cops. that's the thing about law enforcement.. they don't have to be wrong to be total assholes but students (especially drunk ones) need to realize that that doesn't mean they have any less power.
I thought this was an extremely well-written article. You changed my mind.
- Middletown resident
Why are we defending a bunch of hippie students who are an embarrassment to our school? Think about what something like this does to Wesleyan's reputation. You don't see kids our competitor schools like Swarthmore or Vassar pulling shit like this. This is embarrassing, and those kids should be expelled.
1. When the Police show up and tell you to leave, LEAVE.
2. If you challenge the police, they will not back down. Trust me. Most normal people know this.
3. If you hit the police, they will hit you back.
4. How do you avoid getting tased, pepper sprayed or bitten by a dog? DO WHAT THE COPS ASK YOU TO DO DUMB A@@!!!!!!!!
mad:
your "cause and effect" argument is totally nonsensical and should be dropped by you and others.
the police were called by p-safe after p-safe did not have the numbers nor the authority to make students physically leave the area. therefore, however many cars the police send is understandable: they were asked to respond to a large crowd that refused to disperse, and thus sent a proportionate amount of units to handle the request.
now, as the above poster said, if the police did cause more students to flock to the area and--importantly-- stay there, that is by no means the cops' fault-- it's the students' for coming there and then not turning around and going home once they see cops and hear them telling people to go home. even if they did not hear the cops telling people to go home, i mean c'mon: you see multiple cop cars in the street, clearly trying to break up a party, menacing dogs and weaponry, did you think they came out there to look back at you as you cursed them out and refused to budge?
well said. /agree
Grow up!
College is a unique time in life for self exploration and enjoyment. However, this incident should be seen as an absolute embarassment to those students about to embark upon their transition to real life society.
I have to laugh at your justifications for this social uprising.
Best of luck students, you all are in for one rude awaking as you join the rest of us in society.
"Yes, we were partying, yes we AREN'T supposed to be in the street, but it was completely preposterous that 12 cop cars were needed to stop a fucking party."
BULL SHIT!
Put yourself in their shoes. They have a job to do and I as a tax paying citizen expect them to uphold the law and serve the better good of our needs.
You idiots mention that it was hard to hear them ordering your dispersal? WTF you sheltered deralics, I see 12 cop cars pull op, with a dog and chaos all around... I have the brains to know that I shuld get out of there.
Simply amazing the stupidity of you all!
fuck you, 10:05. way to express your opinion in the most hostile, look-i'm-a-complete-douchebag-y way possible. not that i disagree, but seriously.. don't be such a complete asshole about it.
This whole thing only hurts Wes's image. It's really a shame that because of stupid drunk kids here, Amherst, Vassar, Swarthmore, and the like are all looking way better by comparisson. We should be trying to become more refined and elite, and this is doing just the opposite.
I didn't know Wes was engaged in a "who can look better" contest with those schools
10:05: hopefully i'm not the only one who realizes the irony of someone who can't even spell "derelict" correctly pointing out the "stupidity" of others...
to 4:16, 5:28, 8:07, 8:18, 9:19, and 10:05,
and others thinking 'those partying students need to grow up and respect authority:'
In your rush to call Wesleyan students elite, out-of-touch, rich, substance-abusing, and hippie, there is an alarming, border-line fascist message. Police officers in this country exist to enforce laws. They do not make laws, and what they say does not automatically become law. Yes, if a police officer with a pepper spray or a barking dog tells you to move, you need to move to protect your own safety. But police officers' authority does not not mean they are always correctly enforcing law by violently dispersing a crowd. If you want to whine that Wesleyan students get drunk and have parties, go ahead and launch a dialog about that. But please do not call for Wesleyan students to blindly "respect authority." Authority comes from our lawmakers, not from our police officers. If you can, for a moment, separate the police action from the students' celebration Friday morning, imagine 200 people gathered in houses, on yards, on sidewalks, and even in the street on Fountain Ave. on a Sunday afternoon, and several police arriving to disperse the crowd. This would clearly be an unacceptable use of police power. We should not allow this behavior from our police officers, who we pay to enforce laws that we make. Do not let resentment for partying students lead you to support subjugation to tyrannical police power.
I agree with those who characterize this as an embarrassment. If we want Wesleyan to attract the most elite students from the most elite high schools, we can't pull shit like this. Bad media coverage hurts us all. It's better that a handful of kids get kicked out quietly than that our collective reputation suffers compared to our peer institutions. Why can their students be good citizens and ours can't?
I'm sick of all this talk of "reputation" and "refinement" from people who don't seem to know why students choose Wes in the first place.
What's the deal with all of a sudden caring so much about how "elite" Wesleyan needs to appear in order to attract all of those "elite" high school students who might be considering Wes along with Swarthmore and Williams? When I decided to come here it was because Wesleyan was diff. from all those places. Obviously some students acted in a less than brilliant way during the incident, but stop being so incredibly dramatic about the "embarrassment" that has caused to our public image. Yes, the students who threw objects at the police officers should be punished if identified, but that doesn't mean students should be quietly expelled and the excessive use of power exercised by the police that night ignored.
12:35 - I chose Wes because when I applied, it was ranked as one of the top ten liberal arts schools in the country. And I heard that kids had an open mind. But as it turns out, students here feel enlightened and entitled to pull all sorts of illegal shit and then bitch about police brutality.
I think this issue speaks to a much broader problem. Wesleyan is producing students who are leftist to the point of socialism. "Let's get rid of the cops! No state force!" What bullshit. Conformity isn't always a bad thing.
And yes, I DO agree with some of the above commenters who worry about our reputation. Is that totally unreasonable? "Wesleyan" will be engraved on each of our resumes for the rest of our lives. Do we really want it to receive media coverage showing our kids acting snobby and elitist, and disrespecting their elders? Is that really how we want future employers to perceive us if they Google our alma mater?
trying to have a dialog about what some considered to be excessive use of power and being leftist to the point of socialism is quite different. and do you really think things like these don't ever happen at other schools? is this incident big enough to overshadow everything else Wesleyan is known for? chill
word. i have no doubt that the student newspapers of swarthmore and williams and vassar and yale are going to pick up this story, and then all of those kids will gloat about how dumb and privileged wesleyan students are. incidents like this hurt the entire university in the public eye - and in a very far-reaching way.
i don't consider myself elitist or particularly privileged but, as a student, i'm still angered by the completely unjustified use of force against my fellow wesleyan students. i don't think i could ever come up with a complete list of scenarios which would require the use of rubber-bullet guns and dogs for police to gain control, but a regular college party is definitely not on it.
this wasn't an animal house type of situation. the most people were doing was drinking and acting stupid. i'm not pre-law or anything, but i don't think being stupid is against the law. from what i hear there was no direct threat to anybody. now, if someone did throw bottles at psafe, then it does warrant an order to disperse. however, not dispersing does not warrant the use of tasers, any kind of guns, or dogs. it's ridiculous to me that people justify using these things with the reason that wesleyan kids are just so stupid and drunk they can't even follow directions. students not following directions given by cops does not mean cops can do whatever they want to do to them.
i'm sure someone would respond to this with "well, what are cops supposed to do?? these kids are unruly and need to be controlled!" i would respond with a plea to please relax. after a while it was no longer about a bottle allegedly being thrown, it was about students not following directions. that probably angered these aggressive and power-hungry officers of the law moreso than any bottle throwing did. it seems to me that they were feeling disrespected and decided they would do whatever they had to in order to get us in order. and that is not reason enough to physically hurt students or endanger their health.
the whole thing was blown way out of proportion and that's typical on the part of drunken students. but the people who are sober and supposed to protect us should be above that. it is their job to bring order to potentially dangerous and chaotic situations. the party on fountain was not such a situation.
i am frankly embarassed that i go to school in a town that targets students in such a violent and disgustingly hateful way. i am proud that the student body isn't passive enough to just let this slide. we don't consider ourselves above the law. we also don't consider ourselves below respect and fair treatment. yeah the police isn't know for respecting people, that's why they should not have been involved. however, i would like to think that we could reasonably ask for the respect of middletown residents and others who are following this story. too much to ask though, right?
IT DOES NOT MATTER WHO WAS AT FAULT; ALL THAT MATTERS IS HOW THIS PLAYS IN NEWSPAPERS, IN COLLEGE GOSSIP BLOGS, AND ON TELEVISION. And how does it play? "Elitist, drunken, disorderly, liberal students are disrespectful to their elders." Is that really the message we want to shape for prospective students?
No. It's not. So what we should do is always be conscious of how our actions reflect on Wesleyan. If whatever we are doing would not look good if discussed in an admissions booklet, then STOP DOING IT. Prospective students aren't going to analyze these arguments; they're going to see an unhappy, unruly, and disrespectful student body and attend a different college.
12:44 - most people choose wes for a lot more than it being a "top ten liberal arts college."
We're not top ten any more. We're #11, tied with Vassar College.
and, 1:01, a lot of the things kid chose Wesleyan for aren't found in an "admissions booklet."
1:08 - like what? people choose schools based on stats and based on tours/info sessions/impressions. If they hear bad word of mouth, that's not good. Suddenly, NYU is getting that nice, 2400-scoring kid from the elite high school, who would have graduated Wesleyan and made tons of money to give back to the school. The connection is not entirely irrelevant; bad media coverage is NEVER good when we have so may competing schools.
To all the wesleyan students who have posted comments about their embarrassment and about us becoming less "elite": you make me fucking sick. You are simply the epitome of a "tool."
Agreed.
Those of you who are worried about our image rather than the safety of your peers make me really sad- you are in fact the embarrassment. In fact, anyone who doesn't see this situation as the atrocity that it was shouldn't be at wes, including current students.
You are the people Usdan is for. You are the people who they took away Zonker's name for. You are the people that 4 baseball games on wesfest weekend are for. You need to understand that Wesleyan is its own place, and you should leave if you want it to be those other places. We are perfectly aware of what our "reputation" is, and moreover we are proud of it.
I am proud to be at a place where students see that the police were not actually protecting anyone in this situation. No one was better off due to their presence. As others have said, this would have been a normal party had they not made it into what it was. That is key: THEY made it into what it was.
Furthermore, I think we need to focus more on the role that PSAFE played in all of this. The reason the students were in the street was because psafe broke up a very much harmless Buru Style party (they're a band here, for those of you who are at wes for their mad good median SAT range). Given that students were not going to go home, where did they expect us to go? And as many have pointed out, PSAFE is responsible for MPD being able to do whatever they wanted once they arrived on the scene. Furthermore, PSAFE did nothing to protect us once the violence started. So lets talk about PSAFE.
to 3:17
I agree, all those people can fuck off.
However dont place the attention on PSAFE. Police Brutality was the issue. Never should a party on the campus of Wesleyan University need be dispersed by an anti-riot force. They used excessive force. Firing into the sidewalks and porches of students?! They should of just waited around for another half hour till people just went home cause they were tired, i mean it sounds like the cops had nothing better to do anyway, seeing as the entire MPD was at the scene
12:55 - yes!
what I want to know is why only 5 people were arrested. I think making more arrests when people are disobeying the police makes a hell of a lot more sense than sic-ing dogs on them. If people were doing something illegal, arrest them and charge them, dogs only make sense if people are running from or attacking the police.
Yes, maybe I am one of those people they got rid of Zonker Harris Day for. And one of those people that Usdan is for. What's so bad about Usdan anyway? And why should I "leave" simply because I came to Wesleyan for different reasons than you did? I am here because I believe that the Wesleyan name is elite, and will make my resume stand out.
That said, the Wesleyan name could be better. How do you make it better? Simple. Build beautiful new buildings for tours to see. Get rid of stupid days that might attract negative attention. And STOP HAVING CLASHES WITH THE POLICE. I agree with the person a few posts ago who said that negative media attention hurts us all. It really does not matter who was tasered and why - what matters is that every local newspaper and TV show painted this as "drunken stupid Wesleyan students party all the time." That image is not the reason I came to Wesleyan. And I wish our Public Relations office could do its job and spin that story, rather than allowing Michael Roth to confirm it on a public blog.
"the majority of the people who were hit with pepper spray, rubber bullets, etc were NOT on the street."
OK so let me get this straight, the cops used their gps rubber bullet guns to hit students inside there apartments as they were studying? Or they let the k9's run loose in someones house to bite as many people?
Please make some sense out of what you write. OR were you just screaming and throwing bottles from your porch, thinking thats your private residence and you can do whatever you want on it. Then a little pepper spray comes your way and you bitch and complain. Wesleyan is a joke.
here's what I'm getting out of this whole incident: a bunch of drunks were rude to cops, and wesleyan's reputation (and mine, by extension) will suffer as a result. Those kids should be freakin' expelled so that they can never hurt our public perception again, assholes
you're the asshole for only caring about what others (who don't even know you, and would be silly to only base their info on the freaking hartford courant or mtown press) are going to think of you, try to think of the situation outside what only concerns you or your image
"think of the situation outside what only concerns you or your image"
that's idiotic. those people who were rude to authority figures certainly didn't consider me, or for that matter Wesleyan, when they took actions that surrounded the school in a storm of negative media attention. why should we consider them?
taser their asses and strip wesleyan from them, such that they can never hurt our university in the way that they did again.
students just can't pull this shit with the blog culture - word of these indiscretions travels to other college blogs instantaneously, to say nothing of campus newspapers and other national media. we're becoming a laughingstock in people's minds.
If this community has problems, we need to make every effort to ensure that word of those problems does not escape the walls of the university. from the outside, we need to look like the nation's most prestigious, wonderful institution. i guess those asshole, inconsiderate, drunk fuck-ups don't care about this school, its history, or its reputation.
i didn't mean consider those students who fucked up, think of the ones who were standing around for whatever reason and still got hurt. yes, they should have moved, but that doesn't give the police the right, or better yet, the police should have assessed the situation better and not gone overboard with the whole crowd. you're reducing it to a couple of fuck-ups doing something wrong, and the situation wasn't as simple as that.
man, this sucks.
3:17
all i sense when i read your post above is elitism. how dare you decide who should be as wesleyan and who shouldn't.
unfortunately, the our peers put their own safety into jeopardy by refusing for 30-40 minutes to leave the fountain area--street, sidewalk, front lawns. don't you dare tell us we don't belong at wesleyan for highlighting the questionable behavior of fellow wesleyan students. it was questionable, just as the police's response was.
Wesleying, I wish you would remove all posts related to the Fountain incident. Any mention of it in a publicly accessible location only hurts the University.
I challenge any doubters to read what the five arrested students had to say (http://wesleyanargus.com/article/6522) and continue to refuse to believe that the police used excessive force. Students got chased into houses, people. One student was shoved in a cop car, and when he wanted to know why he was being arrested he was tasered twice. I mean, really? You want to spin this as drunken kids who don't respect authority? We had it coming? It's disgusting how quickly this degenerates into 'well-adjusted-I-have-a-wife-and-kids-and-no-longer-think-for-myself' versus 'living-in-a-bubble-hippie.'
If this is authority, it doesn't deserve my respect, or yours. Who is it protecting? I can't see this incident as anything but the latest in a string of PLANNED ATTACKS on students. What's worse, in a lot of instances (and apparently this has everything to do with Officer Clark), the incidents have been racially and socioeconomically based. Compare the incident with what Jose Chapa has to say, for instance: http://wesleyanargus.com/article/6528
Or Alex Magliozzi: http://wesleyanargus.com/article/6527
Sure, Wesleyan is a business, a brand, a line in our resumes. But for those of you who are just in it for that, fuck you. We can primp ourselves up to prefrosh as long as we're telling the truth---but we need to interrogate the trajectory of the campus improvement projects: why did a quirky STUDENT CENTER like Davenport get scrapped for a sterile UNIVERSITY CENTER like Usdan? Just because rich alumni and other donors fund our school doesn't mean we're their bitches. There's such a thing as being a business that's responsible to its consumers.
Wake up.
8:47: You may or may not know this (and this goes for everyone who is hypersensitive about our image), but in 1990 (or thereabouts--it was either '90 or the very late '80s), the president's office in South College was firebombed (by a student) at about 4:30 am. That drew quite a bit of negative media attention--and it's not like there were multiple parties at fault in that instance, like with the Fountain debacle. The applications took a slight hit the following few years, but considering where the school is now, I have to say that it hasn't torpedoed our reputation.
The problem with your way of thinking is that it's the same one that's been used by the admin since Douggie Bennet took over, and if anything, it's just made things worse. Beautiful new buildings to show to tours do absolutely nothing for the people who actually go here. You say that negative attention hurts us all and agree with the people who are so concerned about our image and claim that we can't afford situations such as this in the blog era, when word of mouth travels incredibly quickly. Did it ever occur to you that prospective students might talk to the people who actually go here (and vice versa)? The people who realize the admin threw away $47 million just to build a pretty new building that exacerbates the problems it was supposed to solve? Take a stroll down to Freeman sometime. Note how unlike Usdan, it was not built for the sole purpose of looking nice for tours. Note also that even people at Williams admit that we have the best athletic facilities in the conference, and arguably in all of Division III. We're one of only four NESCAC schools with a 50-meter pool. People want to come to Wes to swim because of that. If they wanted to go to a school with a 25-meter pool that was designed to look as nice as possible and not do the job it was intended to do, they would go to Colby, a school not known for its swimming prowess. People don't make decisions based on transparent attempts at superficial prestige. I, for one, would gladly exchange Usdan's beauty for some half-decent architecture and dining facilities that actually meet the students' needs.
I'm not going to pick a school based on how large its endowment is, or how pretty the campus center is, or how much brightly colored admissions paraphernalia it sends to me. I want to go to a school where my advisor gives me hir home and cell phone numbers, a school that values original thinking, a school where the students treat all of the employees as fellow members of the campus community and not easily replacable low-lifes. Take a look around Amherst's campus sometime. Its facilities are much nicer than ours. I had planned to apply anyway before I toured, but did that dupe me into going there? Nope, and that may well rank as one of the best decisions I've ever made. U.S. News's reports are a travesty, and I'm sick of colleges nationwide bending over backwards so their numbers look appealing to the powers that be at that fine publication. I would be the happiest person alive if Roth pulled a Steven Koblik and said "screw you" to U.S. News. Reed's academic reputation doesn't seem to have suffered from its refusal to play U.S. News's game. I'm not going to criticize your decision to come to Wes, because I at least imagine that you're a sentient being who can make educated decisions, and you know what's best for you. But don't try to force all of us to fit the same mold as you--someone who chose the school based solely on useless statistical rankings and thinks every decision its admin makes should be based on what's best for its public perception. According to admissions' website, "approximately 7,750 candidates submitted applications for the class of 2011." There are over 300 million people in this country. Do you think the refusal of the other 299,992,250 people to apply suggests that Wes needs to try to completely whitewash and reinvent itself?
My high school lacrosse team was ranked #1 in the country in 2001 but was forced to forfeit its season after its captain secretly videotaped himself having sex with his girlfriend and then played the video at a team party. Three years later--after almost everyone from that team had graduated--the team won its 22nd championship. It's hard to win a title without talented players, and it looks like the sex tape scandal didn't have a particularly profound effect on the decision of talented lacrosse players--or anyone, for that matter--to go there. There was a firestorm of negative publicity, and our headmaster was essentially forced out the following fall. We set a new record for total alumni giving that year (which has been broken every year since) and set a new record for participation last year. My graduating class (2006) was the first ever to achieve 100% parent participation in annual giving--just five years after the lax fiasco (and there are at least two people in my class of 75 that had siblings on that team--and probably more that i can't think of right now). People want to go to a school with an 8:1 student-faculty ratio where the students can leave their laptops in the hallway and their lockers unlocked and not worry about having anything stolen. The actions of one self-centered athlete are not indicative of the 850 or so students at the K-12 school.
Yes, this is going to lead to some negative media coverage. Yes, people are going to hear about what happened. But if a prospective student is going to make hir decision based entirely on statistics and one-sided media coverage, Wes is probably not the right school for that person. I'm hard-pressed to think of a high school that would have been better for me, but 13 years of its homogeneity make me look to places like Brown and Wes when the college search time came--that was even one of the things I specifically mentioned to my guidance counselor. Wesleyan is an elite school. So are Williams, Amherst, Swarthmore, Vassar, Middlebury, Bowdoin, Haverford, and so on. Admissions officers always talk about how students need a "hook" that sets them apart from the other applicants. It's a two-way street, but by pandering to people who make decisions based entirely on a computer-generated list of numbers, Wes is taking away that "hook." Excellence alone isn't enough--one out of every four applicants to Harvard's class of 2009 with a 4.0 and 1600 was rejected. Turning Wes into a larger, (relatively) impecunious carbon copy of its peer schools is not the way to keep attracting top students. I was accepted to both Tufts and Brandeis; Brandeis gave me a $25,000 scholarship, while Tufts gave me nothing. If I hadn't gotten into Wes, would Tufts' name recognition and higher position in the rankings have been enough to cause me to turn down 25 grand a year? Not one bit. As far as I saw it, the two schools were interchangeable. If Wes keeps trying to mainstream itself, what's to keep future prospective students from using a similar argument to pick Amherst instead?
I'm not trying to downplay the significance of this event. But I'm assuming that you and others would like to see fewer events like this in the future. A sanitized, cookie-cutter response from the third floor of South College is just going to sweep all of this under the rug and essentially say to MPD that we're okay with their beyond questionable tactics. Only by having our president come forth, lay down the facts, and declare that we're not okay with the actions of this group of "brutal neanderthals" (as someone sitting near me at Bradley on Friday termed MPD) can we ensure that future atrocities like this can be avoided.
mad, i really appreciated your post.
the string of comments by people who are more concerned with blindly respecting authority and with wesleyan's reputation are by far the most appalling and disappointing parts of this entire debacle.
its hard for me to believe that people who have attempted to inform themselves on what happened could still blame the students for the over-the-top police force used and the illegality (not giving out their names and badge numbers) with which the cops conducted themselves.
finally, the an ironic and disturbing aspect of this whole event is that, as a student, i felt unsafe walking around this campus at night this year due to the string of car thefts and muggings. was the middletown police around to protect us and prevent us from these incidents? hardly. yet here they were in full force to break up our parties.
why is it so unreasonable to want to put the reputation of our future alma mater over a few dozen kids who got a little scraped up by the cops?
10:55,
Wesleyan is a unique case, a top school but one that is very unique from its peers. If you chose Wesleyan for its rankings, you might as well go to one of the others because those will better suit what you want in a college. Because at Wesleyan we stand up for ourselves when we are unjustly treated.
Other people reading this thread, disregard the posts of those who would rather protect Wesleyan's image than protect their peers...
They're probably freshmen who lived in fauver/clark this past year.
11:56 - sounds like you went to CHA but I could be wrong meaning a terrible videotape was made at two different schools.
PSafe officers should be held responsible for this entire event. It was completely out of line to call in such a large force of police. Whoever is responsible for the call should be fired and sued.
1:41, freshman in Fauver and Clark were randomly assigned there and could have just as easily ended up in the Butterfields. Stop perpetuating unjust stereotypes. There are too many going around as is.
I liked Davenport when I toured last year. I'm a little disappointed with the sterility of Usdan.
But I'm proud I'll be going to a school where a dialogue like this occurs, where there's enough people thinking critically about authority, as opposed to other schools which might just let this incident passively fade away.
"They're probably freshmen who lived in Fauver/Clark?" Wow... I don't know what to say.
Perspective from a Middletown Resident:
I've lived here for 40 years, I enjoy the College and the students that attend it. It brings much appreciated revenue and workers into our community. It used to be a "small" town and it has grown immensely since the 70's.
If I had a party at my house involving 200 people mingling in or around the street I would expect the police to show up. If one of my guests then threw something at the police I would expect a lot more to happen.
You come here for 4 years and leave, many are not residents of Middletown or even CT for that matter. These are OUR streets not yours, this is where I raise my children and try to teach them to respect the police. This event doesn't make that any easier.
There is plenty of fault for both sides to assume some of it. I know that there has been tension at the University for years towards the MPD and vice versa. I wish that there was an easy way to make our community more aware of the University needs but essentially you are the visitor in our town.
I value your opinions on this matter and regret that it escalated to the level it did without more thoughtfulness to your community. Please try to understand that if the event had been at mine or another residents house and we didn't disperse then it probably would have played out the same way.
We love your campus, students and the ideals of your community but our police department must be able to enforce the law in our town. Obviously PSafe felt that the party had gotten to a point that help was needed, the MPD is not PSafe, they aren't going to wait forever for people to follow their instructions.
It's just too bad that this event will be the last taste of Middletown for some of you, we are a good community and I hope that you will remember that.
To all you Seniors, Good Luck in the next stage of your lives. To the rest, see you next year!
Pete
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