Imagine a Hum conference with dozens, instead of a dozen, participants. It can take more than an hour for a normal conference’s discussion to bear fruit. This huge conference faces a Sisyphean task.
Welcome to last week’s Reed Union.
While a civil, productive atmosphere adorned the Union, it was ultimately saddled with the same problems of definition and scope as any other Reed community-wide discussion. President Kroger’s presence (he noted that he canceled a theater date with his wife so that he could attend) sadly did nothing to make the Union more productive—no one directed questions to him, nor did he offer any remarks aside from a joke during trustee John Sheehy’s ’83 opening speech.
The Union did, however, raise several questions for future discussions. How can Reed thrive in a competitive higher education “marketplace” without compromising its identity? How can the student body maintain its own autonomy without undermining the obligations all members of the community have to one another, be they students, staff, or faculty? Knowing that responsibility is proportional to autonomy, to what level of autonomy should the student body aspire?
The rift between Olde Reed and Nü Reed, perhaps the largest scar on Reed’s communal psyche, went largely unaddressed. While Sheehy did provide a compressed history of Reed, participants otherwise failed to place student body autonomy in a historical context. The transformation of the bookstore from student-run co-op to the bookstore we know today, the rise of student services, and the changes the AOD policy has undergone in the past decade have all changed the student body’s relationship to the administration, but none were extensively considered. Vice President and Dean of Student Services Mike Brody spoke briefly to the latter two phenomena, but no one put his points into an historical perspective.
If the Reed community, and especially the student body, which has an almost complete turnover every four years, is to address the gap between the Reed of mythos (Olde Reed) and the Reed of reality (Nü Reed), let alone understand it, we will need to abandon our flawed, romantic understanding of student body autonomy as an atemporal, god-given right. In its place we must erect a conception of autonomy as a product of hybrid causes over time—laws, mutual community obligations, cultural norms, and individual personalities—that is, we must create an history of autonomy and honor.