Isa Cruz

This Monday, I received a brief and somewhat surprising email from Bowdoin Student Government (BSG) announcing a plan to adopt a new, completely reworked constitution. It included several things I had concerns about, so I decided, for the first time in my four years at Bowdoin, to attend the Wednesday BSG meeting.

When I joined, the discussion had already turned heated. One student, being the only non-BSG student in the room apart from me, talked fiercely about his distrust of BSG, its process and certain changes made. Meanwhile, lots of BSG members, having worked diligently on the new document and other changes, felt that their well-intended efforts were being misconstrued.

A slideshow with a list of concrete explanations assuaged some of my concerns. The other student’s concluding speech, while fiery, also underlined certain unreasonable changes and BSG’s lack of effective communication with the student body. In the end, the vote to adopt the constitution was pushed until next week, and BSG promised to inform students of the change in a more comprehensive email.

This episode reminds me of numerous ongoing impasses, among them, of course, the one between Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) and the administration. What struck me in particular is the persistent suspicion of institutions in each instance. In this way, SJP’s act of resistance is as much an effort to restore faith in Bowdoin as a socially responsible institution as it is an activism to support Palestine. Surely everyone here—the students, staff, faculty and the administration—believes in, or used to believe in, this place and the power it carries. That’s why people choose to devote their careers here, and that’s why people are fighting so persistently to make changes happen. However, disconnection begets distrust, and dismay results in disarray.

The ultimate question remains: How do we restore this trust? Consistent, clear and effective communication is the easy answer, but in what way? I don’t intend to dismiss the recurring office hours hosted by the President and the Dean of Students; they have, at least for me, established a way to talk to the actual people behind the nebulous catch-all word, “administration.”

However, I also want to recognize how insufficient these might feel when only a limited number of students can attend. Meanwhile, student-oriented discussions also preclude engagement with faculty and staff. It is worth noting that staff who are employed without many protections and untenured faculty are at the highest risk when speaking up; the former also may not have built-in time in their schedule to engage with campus issues.

What I’m trying to get at is a structural vacuum for public discourse in neutral spaces and with broad audiences. When the dissemination of information only takes place unidirectionally and online, we will invariably start to engage with ideas, not people. The BSG incident tells us disagreements are inevitable, but without the dedicated time for public comments, the process of finding mutual understanding would not have happened.

The campus environment improving, I’d argue, requires the administration to take students more seriously and, equally, we students to take this institution seriously. This means the College should do a better job of informing students of the rationale for decisions with transparency and timeliness. Meanwhile, we also need to do our due diligence in learning about the administrative side of the College and give the credit where it is due.

More importantly, it means that we need regular public forums where conversations cease to become individual, episodic encounters in reserved rooms and private offices. The etymology of “forum” comes from Latin, meaning “what is out of doors.” That is to say, to overcome the convenience of hearsay, social media and mass emails, and come together where everyone can congregate, listen and learn.

Discussions in public, openly and honestly, take courage and vulnerability. They require us to set our emotions aside, no matter how raw and visceral they might be, and believe that others are engaging with good faith. I acknowledge that public conversations are not the solution for everything, but without even having these in place as a regular occurrence, any talks of open conversations and solidarity only create more echo chambers than trust and clarity.

No more passionate Instagram posts and impersonal email statements. Let’s have a place to talk, in person, together.

Chris Zhang is a member of the Class of 2025.