Nemsie Gonzalez
Editor-in-Chief
Breaking News: The College of Wooster releases new merch with a conservative dog whistle. JK! Or maybe not. The College has entered a new era in branding; rather than hand out a shirt that says “Welcome home” with the Wooster insignia, we now have new shirts that state “United by tradition” with what I assume is supposed to be the Kauke Arch. ‘But Nemsie, obviously, it is talking about the tradition of walking through the Arch!’ But is it really that clear? If the shirt had outlined students coming out of the Arch, maybe I would’ve bought that, but I think the shirts are a total flop, for lack of a better, more eloquent word. It is quite possible I am reading too much into the College’s marketing choices, but in a world where Sydney Sweeney can show up on my screen with her big…blue eyes and blonde hair and talk about her “great jeans, ” I can’t help but think about how much our words matter.
To quote former Vice President Kamala Harris — “You exist in the context of all in which you live and what came before you,” so yes, we might attend a college that is chock full of fun traditions like filling the Arch or I.S. Monday, but we are also actively living through major political crises. Our beloved Center for Diversity and Inclusion office has been forced to rebrand and is now the Center for Belonging and Intercultural Dialogue, Gov. Mike DeWine has signed a ban on DEI in Ohio public colleges, Trump is working towards “Ending Radical And Wasteful Government DEI Programs And Preferencing” and people across the United States are losing access to healthcare, student financial aid and so many more resources that help us to meet our basic physiological and psychological needs. We live inside the context of U.S. imperialism and colonialism, and we are a part of that longstanding tradition, whether we like it or not. So when the College chooses to hand out shirts to all our incoming students that say “United by tradition,” we have to ask ourselves what that really means.
Tradition can be uniting, yes, but it also historically has been quite divisive. Tradition is not always about culture or holidays; sometimes, tradition is about maintenance. A traditionalist, for example, is “an advocate of maintaining tradition, especially so as to resist change.” So what traditions are we talking about, exactly? It is true that the College has never been segregated, but this feels more like insider knowledge and irrelevant to our purposes here. It is also true that the College has been and is still complicit in deep-rooted traditions of social injustice. Take, for example, our investments in the war machine or the College’s response to pro-Palestine sentiment (anyone look at that new protest policy lately? The one that fundamentally goes against the core principles of protest?), or perhaps the retention rate of our staff and students of color or the lack of empathy many of our low income students have experienced inside the business and financial aid offices?
What I’d like to get across here is that we, as an institution and as people, need to be much more careful about the things we choose to say. Our words are so powerful, especially now. So maybe I am reading too much into the new shirts, but maybe the College should know better than to approve of these tone deaf, ugly shirts in a time of so much political uncertainty, in a time where human rights are constantly on the line, where tradition is being used as a tool for the justification of oppression, where the College has rolled back their POSSE program and has maintained their discontinuation of the Allen Scholarship program. How we market ourselves to others is important, so rather than leave people wondering if the tradition we are talking about is one of social injustice, we should work harder to be clear about our intentions. I encourage any artists or marketing experts with more time than I do to design better shirts for next year, because these just were not it.