College Center multimedia installation personalizes job eliminations

Seven people stopped to watch the television screens, five people examined the brick-like boxes and many more observed the T-shirts and photos hanging from clotheslines. On Wednesday, Nov. 4 at 3 p.m., a time when students usually rush through the North Atrium of the College Center trying to get to class, the traffic stalled. Students, professors and staff stood together and contemplated the images, sounds and structures surrounding them.
Called "Vassar Works Because We Do: A Community-Powered Multimedia Installation" and inspired by Gregory Halpern's 2003 photography book, Harvard Works Because We Do, the installation strived to make visible the oft-overlooked lives of Vassar's workers.

"The exhibit wasn't really a product of the Campus Solidarity Group, but rather a looser, community-powered effort that came together in the last week or two in improvisational ways that escalated into the form you saw in the Atrium," Adjunct Associate Professor of English Judith Nichols clarified. "My sense is that the exhibit will keep growing, if there is a desire or a need for this."

At the exhibit, visual and aural stimuli bombarded individuals from every direction. Large red boxes adorned with photos and quotes blocked the space's center, T-shirts hung from the ceiling, flyers were scattered across the floor, two televisions screened a short documentary and posters covered the walls. A large jar collected donations, while people added their names to the Campus Solidarity Working Group's mailing list. According to their brochure, the Working Group is "a coalition of students, staff and faculty" hoping "to push the administration to increase Vassar's financial transparency."

Working Group member Nathan Orians '10 explained, "We wanted an aesthetic that stops the flow of people. We hope that this exhibit warms people up to our ideas."

A section of Vassar's Mission Statement inspired the exhibit: "Vassar College is committed to working toward a more just, diverse, egalitarian and inclusive college community where all members feel valued and are fully empowered to claim a place in—and responsibility for—our shared working, living and learning."

While Vassar has been called a preferred employer in the Hudson Valley, the organizers of this event believe that the College is not treating its workers with fairness and respect.
Nichols conducted interviews with staff members, and those transcripts appear on the posters surrounding the hallway. With these posters, Nichols hoped to publicize the employees' faces and their stories. "It is hard to imagine that what is happening is that we don't know the faces of the people who have sacrificed the most," she said. "The exhibit provides a visual sense that these are the people who feel vulnerable, and Vassar should not be destabilizing the community and permanently damaging it."

Nichols also designed the boxes as a metaphor for the process of building and demolishing a community. The boxes solicit onlookers to engage with them through reading, assembling and dissembling, as the sign in front of the boxes correspondingly stated: "Handle with Care. Engage. Rebuild." "Building community is our responsibility, and we have to keep it stabilized," Nichols described.

The boxes were papered in black and white photos depicting laid-off workers and present workers, including individuals cooking in the All Campus Dining Center, cleaning in the dormitories and carpenters making repairs in academic buildings. Quotes from these workers, sections from Vassar's Mission Statement, Pete Seeger song titles and the exhibit's title also covered the boxes. One box read, "What did you learn in school today?" while another stated, "What happens to institutional memory and wisdom if senior employees are coerced into retirement?"

Large white T-shirts with the "VC" insignia represented each employee that has been laid-off, while small colorful construction-paper T-shirts symbolized the employees who might lose their jobs. "[In the process of creating] the T-shirts, we realized that there were lots of administrators who we didn't know were fired," Orians explained. "They are the most silent group that we are trying to reach out to. There is a feeling of fear, and people are really coming together; this solidarity is really important for the community's health."

On the floor of the College Center, the organizers taped a flyer that has also been posted in numerous buildings around campus. Depicting a photo of two young children in Christmas attire, the flyer states, "Job Elimination: Vassar decided to give our daddy a last paycheck for Christmas." By recycling an already prevalent image for their exhibit, the organizers hoped to connect their initiative to other discussions concerning employment on campus.

Orians, along with Jamie Stevenson '10 and John Joyce '12, produced a documentary video that relays the perspectives of four faculty members and one alumna-cum-staff member. The poignant interviews discuss the presence and absence of voices on campus.
"What students engage in when they make a film about corporatization at Vassar College, or they take a photo that captures the implicit pain and suffering in laying-off community members is democratic engagement," Nichols added. "If some administrators chastise students for engaging in democratic discourse in a way which is a little too noisy, a little too disruptive, a little too arrogant, [we can] take heart in knowing that shaming is an very old strategy that it only has power if you believe it."

The students organized the video around five core questions: How do you envision the Vassar community? In what ways is the Vassar community changing? What can students do? What is our voice worth? and What is our education worth? Through these questions, the students attempt to locate Vassar's qualities, examine how these values are at risk and ascertain what actions they can take.

"We are all together in this small enclave for four years and we connect in many ways," Visiting Associate Professor of English Karen Robertson responded to the first question in the video. "So the problem that I see now is that an indifference to members of the community affects all of us, and that's troubling me deeply."

"It is concerning," Associate Professor of Political Science Katherine Hite added. "We want to make sure that [we have a voice in] the ways decisions are being made. We want to democratize the process. We want to make sure that it's open. We want to make sure that it's transparent, that we understand the kinds of constraints that the administration does face." 

In an emotional moment, Vassar alumna and Field Work Office Administrative Assistant Robin Laurita '05 expressed, "Nobody wants to be out picketing and looking foolish and making cardboard signs," she said. "It's humiliating when you are not given an appropriate opportunity and a voice; it leaves you no other option. It's horrendous that we have to stoop to this and that we have to rely on children, young adults, to be a voice for us, because ours is so marginalized."

This past Tuesday, Nov. 10 from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. in the Retreat, the Working Group organized a Teach-In as part of the First National Day of Action for Education Rights. The Teach-In involved a practical, participatory and action-oriented forum. Students set up a platform, wreathed with a banner, on which Faculty, Staff and Students stood and shared their perspectives on employment and the Working Group's presence. Students gathered while eating their lunches and Professors stopped to listen to their colleagues.
At the event, flyers for the Working Group and a petition to the board of trustees covered the Retreat tables. The petition, circulated by Nichols, states, "the principles of divestment in faculty and other workers at Vassar will, in a very short period of time, significantly damage curriculum, community, core values and finally, and most importantly, the future of our institution."

Professor of English Beth Darlington read sections from William Blake and John Donne's poetry, quietly quoting, "No man is an island entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main." She added, "We have a responsibility to care for each other." English co-chair Michael Joyce, who took the stage next, lauded the event's organizers, stating, "I am proud of how the members of this group have conducted themselves with dignity and intelligence." He went on to discuss the benefit of a continuous dissentious discussion within the College community. "We must think differently about the shape that resistance can take," he said. Robertson described how the employment crisis has damaged our scholastic community. "It fractures the scholarly community and hierarchizes those on tenure track," she said. "Those who are marginalized with lesser pay do not matter—this teaches students the values of plutocracy and contempt for inferiors."

Discussing last week's installation, Nichols applauded the work of these dedicated students. "I am proud of so many Vassar students for their current passionate recognition of our need to work together across campus to make certain that short-term solutions to the current economic situation do not damage our integrity or core values as an institution," she stated.

While this installation only lasted for one afternoon, the students and staff organizers plan to continue sharing information, stories and perspectives with their peers—and if possible, to do so on a larger scale. "We want to keep doing things and getting support," Orians said. "We want the administration to see us and we want to open up avenues of communication, both traditional and non-traditional."

"It has also had a huge impact because it has drawn me into passionate discussions about principle with students, other faculty and staff, and that's very exciting," said Robertson. "The way we operate at Vassar is that we are so busy and separate and going our own ways. But to draw together as a group and talk about what we most value is very exciting."