Dear WWC
RJ Chittams | April 21, 2022
Dear Warren Wilson College - Faculty, Staff and Students,
I meant to write sooner, but I’ve just been busy. It's been almost a year and we’ve been through some stuff. Haven’t we?
Hopefully, we can reflect together because this year has been a little tough. Many of us have been asking a very important question this year, “Does WWC practice what it preaches?” I think that this question is more dangerous than we may have originally thought. There is a dualism in our community that I’ve struggled with this year, and I hope that we can talk about it. We, meaning faculty, staff and students, need to have a very real conversation.
Warren Wilson College, I love you. I love the physical space that we share. Watching the sunrise over the farm is a vista that cannot be rivaled by any other view I’ve seen on a college campus. There is a continuity in our campus culture that has persisted longer than any I’ve seen in higher education. Our talks about sustainability and the attempts we take in that regard are commendable. Our campus supports each other in a myriad of ways. We support each others’ identities and rally around each other in times of specific need. DEI work and its language permeates all of our spaces. We are working towards our own personal utopia.
Warren Wilson College, I am frequently terrified by what I see. Sometimes I feel like I am living in a hemp-clad dystopia. We actively destroy our physical spaces through vandalism and plain old negligence. As sustainability-minded as we are, I've felt consumable as a transactional entity on campus. I’ve watched as members of our community were consumed under the weight of conformity. It appears that folks are disposable once their value to the collective has run out. Our campus appears to celebrate diversity as long as it is different like us. We welcome diversity as long as it doesn’t specifically challenge us and our way of thinking and life. We actively participate in some insidious othering, the practice of labeling people as not fitting into our social group norms. Conversations on-campus use the language of DEI while actively behaving in ways that are more akin to colonization.
I’m tired.
Our campus is mired in privilege. It is steeped in an insidious desire for power, fueled by ideological morality. The mob arrives in situations where our sameness is challenged. Different opinions are labeled as dangerous and must be quelled by any means necessary. Comply or be consumed by our righteous fire. Resistance is futile.
We want to hold space for restorative justice for ourselves but are willing to exact punitive punishment on them? We champion accountability so that they can be held responsible for their actions. Simultaneously we are defiant in our own compliance with community standards. We crave exceptions because we believe that we deserve to be treated differently or better than others.
Can we see the harm that we have caused? Have we seen the tears of people that we have decided it is okay to attack? Do we understand the discomfort that some people in our community live with every day? What risks are we willing to take? Are we prepared to truly be held accountable?
Warren Wilson College, I am hopeful. We stand at the precipice of greatness and I believe we have the capacity to lean into it. There is a passion about this campus that fills me with hope. In my opinion, the ferocity of passion that we possess cannot be taught. However, like a wildfire, our passion is all-consuming in its march forward. It appears in many spaces that we believe that our best days were in days past. That if we just were to go back to how things were, everything would be better. I posit that our best days are yet to come, if only we have the courage to reach for them.
The question I ask us is, “What privileges are we willing to give up to get there?”
