Letters to the Editor

Asian Quilt receives inadequate funding from VSA

After reading The Miscellany News staff editorial about misallocation of community funds, I feel it is important to highlight the inequality of funding for VSA organizations. During the VSA budgeting process last spring, Asian Quilt (AQ), a literary magazine that has been around since 1990, was allotted a mere $200. It was started to create space for Asian Americans to feature their work. Today, we bring together diverse works that resonate with AQ’s themes about Asian America and the immigrant experience by both Asians and non-Asians.

There is no justification for why our budget was slashed by more than 50 percent from $700 the previous year. In fact, there was every reason to expect a budget increase: in the last two to three years, we’ve published two new volumes, both of which are a grade above our earlier editions. AQ has been expanded to include submissions from beyond the Vassar campus—Volume 6 featured pieces from students at MIT, Brown, and Yale. That we produce one of the finest student publications has not escaped the notice of the English department, which is using AQ in its 200-level Asian-American literature course this fall. We have also been incorporated into curriculums at Indiana University and the University of California-Santa Cruz.

We charged for AQ in the past, but Volume 6 has been given away to students on campus. We did this primarily to widen our readership, but part of it was also that VSA suggested that if we stopped selling our publication, we would get more school funding.

Yet, the fact remains that we got a pittance from VSA. In order for AQ to publish 200 copies, we need about $1200. Due to this, we’ve had to be selective and give AQ out at special events like the Activities Fair and ALANA center meetings.

Interestingly enough, Peter Anteyles, our faculty advisor in the English Department, told one of our members that student magazines should have at least $1800, which would not only go to increase quantity, but go to improve the quality of layout and design.

What other Vassar organization runs on $200? How did this happen? Certainly it is not because AQ has been inactive about raising money of its own or doing programming on campus. We’ve done a lot of fundraising from food sales—you may have bought sushi from us—to selling copies to departments and offices on campus. We had a successful release party last May due to the sponsorship of the Asian Students Alliance that brought Quang Bao to Vassar, the director of the Asian—American Writer’s Workshop in New York City.

All of first semester, AQ spends fundraising, taking away time and energy from the substantive work of putting together a good magazine. Our hopes have also been to publish on an annual basis and bring writers to speak on campus, but we have been unable to do so because of financial constraints.
From what I understand, VSA community and capital budgeting funds have been enlarged; VSA is not without the money. Other student publications have the wherewithal to publish extensively, so what happened to fair funding?

At a top liberal arts college, the general lack of support for campus literary magazines is a shame, but the dismissal of Asian Quilt, a first-rate and long-running publication, is an inequality.
—Eileen Lee, Asian Quilt Editor-in-Chief

CIA meeting inappropriate venue for protest

The Faculty Commons was packed the evening of Oct. 11, filled with students listening with rapt attention as a recruiter spoke of job opportunities at the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency. Save the stifling heat in the cramped room, everything was going smoothly and the talk given was interesting. Did it have to be interrupted by fellow students predictably trying to protest the fact that the CIA, in their eyes, had the audacity to even set foot upon our campus? Is there anywhere at Vassar that we can escape this?

I came to the recruitment meeting tingling with excitement. I wanted to learn more about the agency, how it really ran its operations instead of the popular image that has come to characterize the CIA. Even if the job of an average CIA employee may not be as thrilling as a scene from the X-Files or James Bond, the prospect of working there remains appealing nonetheless. In fact, most of the students present at the meeting seemed genuinely interested in working for the agency.

So it came as no surprise to me that the attempts to protest the meeting and heckle the recruitment officer, Jeanmarie, were not tolerated by those present. As one of my fellow students put it so bluntly, “We’re here to learn about jobs.” And that’s exactly why we were there and I think most of us were tired of hearing the rhetoric presented by the protesters. It was simply not the place for the protesters to carry out their plan.

And quite frankly, I don’t know what the protesters were trying to accomplish at the recruitment meeting. We’ve all heard the stories of atrocities, assassinations, espionage, etc. If they were trying to shock us with these stories, obviously it wasn’t working. In The Miscellany News articles about the CIA’s recruitment meeting [Anita Varma and Patrick Murray’s News article, CIA Recruitment Session Also Site of Protest, and Max Shmookler’s Opinions article, CIA Recruitment on Campus Unethical], those who stood against the CIA complained about Jeanmarie’s evasion of their pointed questions about the CIA’s more shady dealings. Why should she have to answer for them? She’s a recruitment officer, not the director of the CIA. She wasn’t there to answer for or apologize for the agency she works in. She was doing her job and she handled these harsh and almost militant accusations made against the CIA in a fully appropriate manner. She acknowledged these statements, but made it clear that she was not here for the purpose of further discussing them.

I also find it offensive that Shmookler’s article concerning the CIA made the assumption that we, who expressed our annoyance at one particular protester’s interruptions and are looking into the CIA as a job prospect, do not care about human rights, global security, etc. To make such a blind assumption not only insults our intelligence and humanity, but also those who already work for the agency, some of whom are risking their lives for this great country.

The protesters’ comments were rude and uncalled for. They were wasting the time of Jeanmarie and the students involved. If they want to express their outrage at the CIA and other government agencies, they have all the right to do so, but I think they need to learn the appropriate place to do it, and the recruitment meeting was most definitely not the place.
—Jolene Combs ’07