Off Topic, On Point | Walls indicative of Vassar’s attitude towards community

Evan Casper-Futterman Columnist

When hundreds of Vassar staff, faculty and students turned out one year ago for the Poughkeepsie May Day march down Main Street, there was a definite feeling of progress in Vassar-Poughkeepsie relations. Many were glad to participate in a meaningful partnership with Poughkeepsie residents of different classes and nationalities—people from whom we often lament our alienation. Yet even if such a groundbreaking event were to take place every year, it wouldn’t change the fact that we live behind a wall. And that is what Poughkeepsie sees in each of us, even when we reach outside of it.

It was not without a monumental sense of irony that Phase I of the construction on Raymond Avenue began a matter of weeks later. Now that we have arrived at Phase II, as The Miscellany News reported (“College, DOT plan construction for Arlington,” 4.13.07) it appears on the surface that Vassar has an opportunity to make an important symbolic gesture in our relationship with our home Poughkeepsie: the removal of the stone wall along Raymond Avenue, and of the link fence that lines Collegeview Avenue.

I really can’t pretend to be unbiased here: I’ve had it in for these two enclosures since I got back from my semester abroad last year. In the wall, I see ignorance, sloth, and the decrepit remains of an approach to neighborly relations that has time and again proven harmful and shameful to our species. I want them to disappear—preferably at the hands of an organized and elite student task force at dawn on a quiet spring morning, but an official decree from the President or Dean of the College would be fine, too.

The Miscellany News’ coverage of the construction reported that the wire fence along Collegeview Avenue would be removed as part of an attempt to “achieve a more natural transition” between Arlington and the college campus. Unfortunately, the coverage of the project cemented in my mind a sobering fact. Since walls are physical manifestations of boundaries that exist within each of us, removing them is kind of like stamping out the top part of an anthill: It doesn’t really solve your ant problem, it just makes it a less visible problem. The removal of any wall must, as I see it now, take place concurrently with broad changes in institutional and individual behaviors and attitudes. Given the way that the College continues to view itself, I see little evidence that the removal of the fence will bring the changes that I once thought it would.

On the Office of Admissions website for Vassar College, the campus is described affectionately as “picturesque acres…manicured lawns and formal gardens” all centrally located on the main campus. It is this kind of language that troubles me when I place it in context with the removal of the Collegeview Avenue fence, and the expansion of “landscaped medians” along Raymond Avenue as far as Route 44/55.

Rather than some grand gesture of communality from the College, doesn’t Phase II represent an expansion of the vision that led to the walls and fences in the first place? In other words, I wonder if the College is contemplating the removal of these boundaries—not because it desires more balance and interaction with the surrounding Poughkeepsie community, but rather because the territory they demarcate is becoming irrelevant and is too small for the long term plans of the College.

The wall and fence are fossils that should have disappeared long ago, yet both their power and weakness lie in their symbolism. Out of context, and on the surface, the removal of the fence that lines Collegeview is an important step forward, but I worry that it is being done for expansionist reasons, rather than as a result of any re-imagining of the College’s place in the Poughkeepsie community. The College appears not to be re-inventing itself, but rather enlarging the depth and extent of the “manicured” territory over which it presides—beyond the modest walls and fences that we know so well.

I want the removal of the wall to affirm a change in the historically inconsiderate institutional behavior of the College, as several faculty members and students commented in the The Miscellany News feature. It seems that although the fence along Collegeview Avenue may be coming down, Phase II of the construction project reveals the same institutional tendencies that led to the placing of the stones and the fence along Raymond and Collegeview Avenues some years ago.

As important, but also transient, four year stakeholders in the community life of the College, the student voice in a locational issue such as this could be easily lost. Yet we students should make sure that our college’s ambitions for extending the carefully manicured lawns of campus into Arlington are not pursued in our name.