Nemsie Gonzalez
Editor-in-Chief
Throughout my time at Wooster, I have had a love-hate relationship with the College. Despite what my past viewpoints and emails to school administrators may lead you to believe, I truly do love Wooster, but the Wooster I once felt so prideful in seems to be falling apart in front of my eyes. The staff are overworked more than ever before, faculty seem despondent and students feel invisible and lost. I don’t want to beat a dead horse, but we all know the school is struggling in more ways than one.
What I believe has been lost, especially in the wake of losing 22 members of the College community, is hope. To bring back some hope, I will try to remind us of the importance and power of community. Community allows us to carve out spheres of resistance. Places where we can rest, love and play peacefully without fear. Students and staff of color are veterans in this kind of work. Academia was not made for us, so we’ve had to reconfigure the space and make it our own. It is this work that inspires me, and in drawing attention to this often underappreciated work, I hope to inspire the campus community to start fighting for a better future.
With an administration hell-bent on avoiding transparency, strong communities that are willing to fight for one another are necessary to protect the future of the College. Like anything worth doing, it will take time and effort. Even so, community is so much closer than you think. As a first-year at the College who had always grown up around people of color, I was scared, but I found both safety and strength when I started attending multi-cultural events and club meetings like Latinas Unidas and Black Student Association. While the Black Manifesto and its corresponding protests have largely been forgotten, I want to remind us of its impact. Personally, the bravery of a gaggle of students who protested at McCall’s inauguration is what inspired me to find my voice and showed me the power of student protest. I have recently heard people call protests futile and performative, but when backed with demands, they can be very powerful. The protests in fall of 2023 led to changes in Lowry dining hall and the resignation of two staff members who weren’t listening or serving the campus community.
Wooster has always been a school of protest and resilience, with students who care deeply about justice. Resilience is in our bones. While it isn’t fair, we need to keep fighting to be heard. If we want change from our administrators, we must force them to listen. We will need to engage in community to rest, find joy and recharge, but we need to continue working harder to make this college better than what it is. Our sense of community has been fractured by an incompetent administration who refuses to listen or be honest to staff, faculty and students, but it can be rebuilt. Those with more time left on campus, I implore you to remember why you came here and what makes Wooster so special. Students, stay up to date with campus news and voice your opinions out loud, not just on Fizz. Call out administrators publicly by name, email them or submit a viewpoint to the Voice. Faculty, you have done a great job building relationships with students and supporting us, but you can do more for staff. Join a campus committee so our already overworked staff don’t have to. And to the most privileged amongst the student body, I implore you to help pick up the workload and get engaged both in community building and in acting as an accomplice because the rest of us are exhausted from fighting for ourselves.
We are not customers, despite what McCall might say in her private meetings; we are a community, and the College and its administrators need to work for us, not against us. Change is possible, we just need to work at it. The board of trustees and McCall are counting on your silence, don’t give it to them. I’ve loved being your editor-in-chief and serving you all these last three years, even when you haven’t loved me back. NG out!