At Yale, free speech hits a wall

Pie in Your Face
    By Sheela V. Pai

It became a familiar sight to me last year when I left Cross Campus Library every weeknight at around midnight. It was the sight of socially conscious Yalies running around in the dark, chunks of chalk in hand, scrawling statistics and commentary about the day's hottest issues, from tenure reform to the death penalty, on the blue wall surrounding Berkeley. And, without fail, I always let out a groan. There was something that irritated me about this ritual, something I just couldn't quite put my finger on until I read about the plans for a "free speech wall" [YDN, 9/9/99]. Since September 1998, several Yale students have been working with the Administration to create a public forum wall in Machine City, where students can continue to throw around statistics and one-liner opinions in a more legitimate setting. At one point in the article, one of the students involved in the project, Lauge Sokol-Hessner, JE '00, stated, "Yale's had a pretty good history of activism, I think, so it would be pretty appropriate to have a good healthy discussion going."

But that's exactly it. Yale does have a rich history of activism. It can be traced from the undergraduate days of Yale Corporation member and Baltimore Mayor Kurt Schmoke, DC '71, who participated in civil rights rallies in New Haven, to the the Tenure Action Coalition of today, which holds panels to open administrators' eyes to the shameful ineffectiveness of the new tenure policy. Such activities have educated us while promoting a crucial dialogue among different members of the Yale community. They've allowed administrators, faculty members, students, and activists to share their views at length so that everybody involved can arrive at their own conclusions.

But this is not what the Berkeley wall did, nor what the free speech wall would do. Pink chalk scribbles providing random facts about the makeup of the faculty and the student body, or such insightful social commentary as "Pale, Male, and for $ale," may be provocative, but they fail to launch intelligent and lively debate. When I walked with my friends across Cross Campus last year, I remember that we would flinch at some of the rants covering the Berkeley wall. We found many of the facts interesting, and wondered for a couple of minutes whether they were really true, but that was the end of it, because arguments supported by statistics fuel debate, not statistics alone.

The Administration is now considering shifting this forum by shoving the messages of angry anonymous activists down people's throats and into Machine City. Yes, Machine City—where everyone is too caught up in either cramming for an exam or trying to decide between buying a Snapple or a Coke to read the walls, let alone to contemplate the troubles of sweatshop workers who make Yale merchandise. If the Berkeley wall shortchanged these issues, the free speech wall will reduce them to a whimper.

I'll admit that I can't even begin to fathom the challenges faced by activists on this campus. They must struggle constantly to penetrate the minds of apathetic Yalies and closed-minded administrators. But chalk markings on a wall are definitely not the answer. Editorials in papers, panels, rallies, and talks force people to actively confront these controversial issues. They introduce new, coherent arguments and positions, making people say for once, "I never thought of it that way before." While graffiti messages may cause sparks in some people's minds, in most cases these sparks will fizzle rather than light fires. Machine City's free speech wall, though an admirable attempt to add to Yale's history of activism, will, in the end, be nothing but an insult to it.

Recent Herald Columns by this Columnist:
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• Berkeley serves up superiority, 9/17/99
• Yale elitism: alive and kickin', 9/3/99

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