Letters to the Editor

Students should challenge privilege

When I wake up in the morning, my bathroom is miraculously clean, my hallways swept, and the recycling bins empty. I also often get to have an interesting conversation with one of the lovely people that clean Raymond House. In the winter the sidewalks are free of snow, and in the spring the grass is trimmed. There is always food available somewhere on campus.

Automatons don’t provide these things; there are real people, with real feelings, and they work here because they like earning a living while seeing that we, the students, can have an environment in which to learn. They like us, and yet it seems that many students forget that the staff here at Vassar are human beings as well.

I’ve seen some of my fellow students react to the staff in the most disrespectful ways. Whether the person is a security officer or an All Campus Dining Center employee, I’m certain a student has verbally harassed them at some point. Or, as is often the case with the cleaning staff, most students completely ignore them. How can we fail to acknowledge the people who literally clean our crap?

How many of us know the name of the person that cleans our toilets, or the name of the security guard who walks our dorms to protect us? How many students know the name of the person who cooked the meal you had today? When was the last time you had a conversation with the person who mows our lawns, or vacuums the common spaces? Have we ever asked them how their day was, or how their family is doing?

It’s important that we all acknowledge our privileges. We are privileged to be in a position where our every need is provided by people who actually care about us. In acknowledging this privilege, we have to remember that we are not better than the staff that cleans, cooks and looks out for us. We live in a society where we are conditioned to expect to be served. Therefore, we form attitudes that we are better than other people based on things that are insignificant judges of character, such as money and prestige. There is no reason for us not to break the conditioning we have acquired and treat the various staff members with respect.

We also should strive to take this past the little stone walls that surround the campus. Why do we feel entitled to be served wherever we go? Vassar is a safe place for us to begin breaking down the systems of oppression we’ve acquired, and we shouldn’t build them back up when we are off campus, or after we graduate.

I’m going to begin striving to challenge the privileges I’ve been trained to think I deserve. Classism affects each of us in some way or another. We’ve come to the point where we don’t see each other as equal human beings, and that needs to change. After all, it’s not really all that difficult to challenge these notions. It can start with a simple “thank you”, or a “hello.”

—Royce Drake ’10

Off-campus transportation important

Since last semester, the Campus Community Advisory Committee (CCAC) has been discussing issues related to Vassar’s involvement and engagement with the local community. The committee has been charged with the task of making proposals to President Catharine Bond Hill in order to improve our relations with the greater Poughkeepsie community.

The students on the committee have made one point clear: One of the most significant barriers to engagement with the Poughkeepsie community is the lack of a functional and regularized transportation system.

Recent all-campus surveys seem to echo this point; in a transportation survey conducted by a subcommittee of CCAC in the spring, 93 percent of students felt that “readily available transportation to off-campus destinations” is somewhat important to very important to the quality of student life at Vassar. In addition, a survey recently conducted by the Vassar Student Association on a number of issues found that 86 percent of students rated “better, reliable transportation to local areas” as somewhat important to very important.

It is clear that an overwhelming majority of students see transportation as a major stepping stone to getting beyond the gates.

With this in mind, we, the student delegation to CCAC, urge you to write to Director of Media Relations Jeff Kosmacher and Lecturer in Physics Jim Challey (jekosmacher@vassar.edu and challey@vassar.edu, respectively) to remind them that transportation is important to you.

—Lucy Robins ’08, Mark Goreczny ’08,
Lily Huang ’08, VSA Vice President for Activities
James Kelly ’09