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Point/Counterpoint: Do STAND’s posters inspire, or inflame?

April 09, 2010

Posters were disrespectful

by Danny Garcia

There are plenty of things on campus that could be improved and there are plenty of students who have ideas on what could be done. Once those ideas have been brewed and modified, the next step is to enact change. It is important to note that there are good ways and bad ways to try to enact this change. Good ways include taking the issue to the Senate or setting up meetings with the appropriate administrators. Bad ways include guerilla posters that call for the entire student body to make personal phone calls to individuals. Not only is this tactic wasteful and harmful to the cause, it’s downright disrespectful to everyone on campus.

The entire act of printing off dozens, if not hundreds, of posters to spread around campus is simply wasteful. I am surprised that some of the more environmentally-minded groups have not spoken out against such tactics considering the amount of paper used and litter created. That paper could have been used for a thesis or an article I needed for class. Now it is just another poster that will be ignored because there are three just like it within the vicinity.

Now that people have become desensitized to the issue since they have seen a hundred posters before going to lunch, the cause has been hurt. More likely than not, people will be more irritated than informed. And what’s worse, those who may think they are informed might actually be wrong. In the most recent example of guerilla posters, the signs suggested that money from the College was being invested in shady business deals, perhaps involving shadowy figures with guns, and that Carl Vance knows all about it. For those on campus who do not know the whole story, I will give the abridged version: the College invests its endowment in mutual funds (like many other companies do), and those mutual funds invest the money. It appears that the poster makers are worried those mutual funds are investing money in immoral endeavors. Of course, the school does not even have that information, so who knows where the poster makers got it.

Let us be very clear. The money students spend on tuition goes towards college operations and is not invested. The money students spend on student fees goes towards student groups, and is never invested. In fact, that would be illegal.

The campaign at hand hurts its own cause by misleading its audience; it makes a bigger deal of the situation that it really is. The money the College invests has no connection to the students, unless you are a student who has donated to the endowment. But really, it is money that has been donated, not paid for tuition. When people do not even understand, it makes activism on the subject ridiculous since they just come off uninformed. Activism is good, but activism by ignorance is a waste of time.

Above all, the posters are disrespectful. They are disrespectful to the parties named and violated. Yes, it is uncalled for and a violation to plaster a person’s telephone number with the claim that if someone were to call him, all their questions would be answered. Furthermore, it is disrespectful to students who become uninformed and end up sounding stupid when debating the topic. But most importantly, it is disrespectful to the cause itself. Creating zealots and burning bridges with the people who would actually help solve the problem does not help anyone. It just creates more
tire-spinning activism.

STAND within its rights

by Angela Webber

The posters STAND hung last week, encouraging students to question the administration about the investment of college funds, represented a good first step toward raising student awareness of an on-campus issue.

The students involved in STAND, including Nicola Warmuth (’12), are concerned that LC’s investments may be going to companies like PetroChina, which is associated with funding of genocide. Warmuth has been working for “investment transparency” of the college’s funds for over a year, and has met with Vice President for Business and Finance Carl Vance several times. Vance has told her, and ASLC members and candidates repeat, that it is impossible to know where the College’s money goes because it is invested through multiple mutual funds and is distributed outside the direct control of the College.

However, when a STAND member who was meeting with Vance in a different context asked him about investment transparency, he reportedly took out a folder and showed her the quarterly statements Lewis & Clark gets from the people that invest college money. He reportedly told this woman that he didn’t want to make this information public because he “wanted to avoid the phone calls.”

This incited STAND to hang up posters with the business e-mail addresses and office phone numbers of Vance and interim President Jane Atkinson (information available on the LC website), encouraging students to ask questions of their leaders. This is civic engagement. Calling administrators to make them pay attention to an issue is a reasonable and even relatively calm way to protest.

I am not suspicious that LC’s money is funding genocide, and I don’t know what I would do with the information about our investments if it was available to me. But I think STAND was completely within its right to post these posters, and I think the response from the administration was completely irresponsible.

I saw administrators taking down posters, and I heard ASLC members complaining about them. Some said that STAND was breaking a policy by posting fliers without their names on them, but there is no policy about anonymous posting. There has been discussion about this and I think drafts of a policy have been created, but the policy has not been posted anywhere nor has anyone agreed to it. STAND told me that not putting their contact info on the posters was a mistake and an oversight; but anyone who has been paying attention knows that STAND would be the people behind the flyers. I hope STAND takes their movement forward; I hope they protest in a way that actually inconveniences people. That is how social movements work; you have to make people go out of their way to avoid hearing about the issues at hand. These students have been working hard on this issue, and I don’t think it’s within the right of ASLC and the administration to disqualify their tactics because they don’t agree with their issue.

STAND did what they could. They got to a point where it was obvious the administration was trying to avoid them and their issue. I support this kind of debate, and I think we shouldn’t turn our noses at students who are making an effort.