Letter to the Editor: Less Anonymous Name-Calling, More Constructive Criticism
Submitted on March 14, 2021. Letters do not necessarily reflect the views of the Quest or the Editorial Board.
Content Warning: Discusses suicide, mental health, opiate use and overdose, and death.
Someone put a sticker on the Community Safety Honda that said “This Machine Transports Fascists.” That does not feel like constructive criticism. It doesn’t feel like the action of an intellectually curious person engaged in critical thinking about systems. It feels like name-calling.
I get that life is a lot right now. For some of us, life was a lot before the pandemic started. The pace of change seems to be fast when change is moving in the wrong direction, and slow when it’s moving in the direcon you think it needs to go. It is frustrating to feel like you have limited power to make the changes you want to see in the world. It’s easy to feel like “if only we could all just [fill in the blank].” It’s easy to slip into polarized, “us vs. them” thinking. And it’s easy to call CSOs fascists.
It’s much harder to say CSOs are a diverse group of individuals who care about students. Because I work in the Community Safety Department, I know that CSOs come from diverse backgrounds. We’re diverse in terms of race, religion, sexual orientation, gender identity, country of origin, age, education, and more. Some of us are single parents, some of us have children with disabilities, some of us are survivors, some of us are living with invisible illnesses, and some of us are caring for aging parents. Like everyone else at Reed, CSOs have multiple intersecting identities. We are here, doing a customer service job, because we are the kinds of people who like to help. We are the kinds of people who enjoy being camp counselors, and who see ourselves as part of a safety net at the college.
Let me say that again: We are part of a safety net. We are here when your friend misjudges how much alcohol they can drink in a sitting. We’re here when you use your box cutter incorrectly during Orientation move-in and need to navigate getting stitches in a new city without your support network. We are here when you don’t know what’s wrong, and think you might be dying (we typically get at least one of those calls every year). We are here all night long. We are here every weekend. We are here on every major holiday. We are here during a pandemic. And we make sacrifices to be here.
I referred to our work as customer service earlier. That might sound odd to some folks. Most people wouldn’t intentionally pay to have someone confiscate their alcohol or cannabis. However, unless Reed College can demonstrate that we both have, and enforce, an Alcohol and Other Drugs policy, we risk losing federal financial aid. We risk losing National Science Foundation grants, and other funding. That might not matter to the roughly 50% of Reedies who
are not on some form of financial aid, but I guarantee that the prospect of losing financial aid matters to the roughly 50% of Reedies who can only be here because they receive it.
Most of you haven’t been at Reed long enough to have institutional memory that goes past four years. That means you have no reason to know that the DA once threatened to prosecute Reed College using the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO), as a location of known criminal activity (in that case underage alcohol and drug use) if we didn’t do enough to prove we took that work seriously. Have you ever noticed that CSOs don’t write tickets for minors in possession of alcohol? We don’t arrest people either. We have the same power of citizen's arrest that everyone else on campus has.
CSOs don’t actually sign up for this work because we want to enforce AOD policy (those people don’t make it through the hiring process). We sign up for this work because we want to make sure no one dies. We mostly succeed. If you exclude the two non-Reed individuals who came to campus to commit suicide, then only two people have died on campus since 2010. If you extend that timeline back further, you get to the student opiate overdose deaths that lead to the college getting threatened with prosecution under RICO.
People don’t become CSOs because they’re power-hungry megalomaniacs, because they want to enforce AOD policy, or because they want to tell houseless people that they cannot be here during a pandemic. People sign up to be CSOs because they want to unlock your door, jumpstart your car, walk you across campus when you feel unsafe, patrol campus looking for broken things that pose safety risks, and help you when you need help. People become CSOs because they like the idea of being part of a community, and caring for that community.
Remember that the person you’re calling a fascist is the person who is checking to make sure that there’s naloxone in overdose kits around campus. The person you’re calling a fascist is the person who has signed up to perform CPR on you. They are the person who will be called about the dead body in the construction site North of Grove on a Sunday afternoon, and potentially the person who will coordinate calling a company that specializes in cleaning up after human remains (once the coroner has removed most of the body). Go on, ask me how I know.
For fascists, we’re incredibly responsive to student feedback. The only reason there’s a Honda Fit to put a sticker on is because we were asked by students on the Sustainability Committee to please buy more environmentally friendly cars. Prior to the Honda, we had the Subaru and a Ford Escape (prior to the Subaru we had two Ford Escapes). We use the term cannabis instead of marijuana because of student feedback. We stopped taking unattended laptops into
safekeeping because of student feedback. We have revised our practices around when we call the Portland Police Bureau based on student feedback.
Once again for those in the back: We have revised our practices around when we call PPB based on student feedback.
We are human. We do sometimes make mistakes. Some practices age well, and others need revision. If you see a policy or a procedure that you think should be changed, please tell us. You can tell Gary, you can tell Gary’s boss Karnell, or you can tell our Admin Coordinator Kathy (she doesn’t do any security-type work, and is super-kind). Whoever in Student Life you feel comfortable telling. If you think we can do something better, please tell us. We want to do a good job serving this community. What we don’t want is to be called names by anonymous people who have no productive suggestions for what we can do better.