Last week, Senate primarily discussed RKSK initiation, and addressed issues relating to honor and expectations of student conduct at both schools. Senate elected to unfreeze money allocated to RKSK for thongs to allow students to cover themselves after RKSK signator Swede Pearson discussed measures to make sure participants in and observers of initiation felt comfortable.
Announcements:
- Reed has hired an Assistant Community Safety Director, Julie Houser. Houser served as a police officer for fifteen years. She most recently served in similar positions at Cornell University and Carleton College.
- Senator Kate Hilts is working with Towny Angell, Director of Facilities, on returning more cigarette butt receptacles to campus. Please contact Senator Hilts (hiltska@reed.edu) if you have suggestions for where the receptacles should be placed. Director Angell requests that, if you must litter cigarette butts onto the grass, please deposit the filter in a trash receptacle as they are bad for the grass.
- Senator Nick Fiore is analyzing the results from the CSO and gender and ethnic studies surveys Senate sent out at the end of last year. Visualizations of survey results will be posted in the Quest after break.
- All of the murals on the bottom floor of the GCCs are up for reevaluation (i.e. painting over). If you are interested in painting a mural, keep an eye out for information on how to apply after break in the Quest and SB Info.
- Sophia Barba, Nick Zhu, Oliver Silverton-Peel, and Delali Ayivor were appointed Renn Fayre Czars—look out for a feature by the czars in an upcoming issue of the Quest.
- Student Diversity Committee is working on a biased incident reporting system which would allow Reed students to anonymously appoint racialized and gendered interactions with other community members.
- Senate is seeking applications for the student opportunity subsidy committee. Apply on sin.reed.edu and help implement summer grants for your fellow students.
- Senate wants someone else to write Senate Beat. I can hardly blame them. Email me (pmessick@reed.edu) if you are interested.
RKSK Initiation:
Discussion of RKSK’s initiation centered around two main themes: keeping the spirit of initiation alive while avoiding the triggering of Reedies or Clarkies, and the apparent hypocrisy in attempting to prevent Clarkies from coming to Reed events while we send a U-Haul full of naked students to their campus once a year. Student Body President Danielle Juncal and Vice President Rennie Meyers first relayed the concerns of Dean of Students, Mike Brody, regarding the possibility of Title IX cases being filed on either campus, and the “tricky” fact that, “we are telling them that they can’t come on our campus, yet we send naked people to their campus.”
Senators Evvy Archibald and Galen Harrison reiterated concerns over Title IX cases being filed in the wake of initiation, “If there were Title IX cases filed at Reed in the past due to people being uncomfortable with nudity [in the library], why would we expect reactions at Lewis and Clark to be different?” Archibald said.
Senator Eileen Vinton and others brought up the possibility of restricting where initiation participants could go on Lewis and Clark’s campus, noting that in the past Reed students ran through L&C dorms. RKSK signator Swede Pearson emphasized that Reed students would not be running through dorms this year, and that in-building nudity would be limited to the library.
Pearson iterated steps that have been taken to ensure honorable conduct by Reed students, saying, “We are going to is designate the lower levels of [Reed’s] library as off-limits. We will tell people in advance, so that space can be a safe zone … we are going to give the freshmen a consent talk so when they are going around together and are all squished together in the U-Haul, they are aware of what they should and should not be doing. I have seven or eight upperclassmen working with me on controlling the freshman. I’m hoping with a lot of increased direction, we can keep them in a comfortable space.”
Former Queditor Kieran Hanrahan sparked discussion of hypocrisy in Reed’s conduct, calling initiation a “double standard” when we would be “openly opposed” to similar conduct on Reed’s campus. Senator Jake Lovell agreed, explaining, “It seems that there are so many things that need to go into preserving the tradition that it might not be worth it,” and noted that, despite measures to reduce the likelihood of inappropriate conduct by Reed students, a few people could still “screw it up for everyone.”
Let’s hope no one did.