All College Day mural celebrates its tenth year

Picture this: the College Center circa 2003. A triangular wooden framework sits in the center of the space, right outside the mailboxes, covered in a basic white surface upon which students are both crudely and painstakingly painting statements about whatever comes to mind. "We are the knights of the modern world," the "we" underlined emphatically, reads one comment. Elsewhere, next to a bright orange image labeled "the ivory tower," someone has scrawled both "Bush '04" and "call x3600 for a good time."
Captured in photographs, this was the All College Day Mural Project in its earliest stages.

The Mural Project, in its 10th year, is an open-ended opportunity for students and other assorted passers-by to put pen (or marker or paint) to paper and say what they feel. It provides not only a chance to capture the mood of Vassar, especially as it pertains to the community-building and conversation-starting themes of All College Day, but to reflect on how this mood has evolved over the last ten years.

All College Day, put on by the Campus Life Resource Group (CLRG), was originally organized as a response to an incident involving a racially offensive skit in a Vassar comedy group's performance. The show "just sparked a lot of community discussions about community, about identity, about respectable language," said Associate Dean of the College Edward Pittman, who has been heavily involved in All College Day since its inception. "And so students who were most active said, ‘Well, what can we do to have a sustained response, something that happens every year, as well as regular events during the year that focus on bringing different parts of the community together?'"

The mural provides a public forum for All College Day's dialogue. "The concept for the mural evolved from this notion of a wall mural, and we couldn't create something permanent on the wall, so we had this movable mural," Pittman said. "It's drawing from murals that exist in a lot of communities, which act as a reflection of what people see, what they think, what they feel. I think that's really positive."

The comments that have appeared in years past range from Vassar-centric commentary to total non-sequiturs. The result is something of a lesson on the precariousness of free speech. "Only once or twice did we have something that was more provocative than we wanted," said Pittman. "We are for free speech, but we also believe that free speech can be damaging even when it's free. We don't promote [free speech] as a random thing, because it can be hurtful."

However, Pittman feels that there is space for more confrontational commentary, so long as it is communicated in an appropriate fashion. "You can be strong and targeted, but have it be respectful," he said. "We can all sit and listen and talk to each other through that medium."

Ryan Greenlee '10, a student intern for the Campus Life Office and member of the CLRG, spoke to the presence of detracting voices and what that meant for the mural overall. "There may be a few who may not respect the project and write just any old mess," he wrote in an e-mailed statement. "And that's cool. For them, it's all about them. But this is less about the individual and more about what we can see from a mass of individual voices. Like anything, its potential is limited in part by how willing people are to respect it or take it seriously."

From the perspective of both a student and an administrator, Greenlee and Pittman agree that the mural presents a unique opportunity for members of the Vassar community to make their thoughts public and possibly even effect change in the process. Said Pittman, "I think administrators and faculty and others who make our job of supporting students will find ourselves looking at the mural and really analyzing even the small comments to understand what is being said, and I think that is important."

Greenlee summed up the mural's importance as a part of All College Day and Vassar life in general. "The hope, for me, is to see oneself reflected in some way by the words and images placed there by the expressions of others," he wrote. "If that reflection isn't there, that's important too. Just as it's important to see what is being said, if we can also get to what's not, or who's not, being represented, then can we continue the project of making and sustaining the best sense of community we can."