COLUMN: Removing Roski blog erases student voices
In early September, a Tumblr account run collectively by Roski M.F.A. students since December 2012 was mysteriously and abruptly shut down. The blog followed the resignation from the incoming class of first year M.F.A. students from the Roski School of Fine Arts earlier this year. When the class resigned, the students published an open letter citing concerns over not knowing what the curriculum would be, “other than that it will be different from what it was when [they] enrolled and is currently being implemented by administrators outside of [their] field of study,” as well as not knowing whether they would graduate with twice the amount of debt they had anticipated upon enrollment.
When one of the students sent an inquiry to Tumblr after it removed the Roski blog, they learned that the popular blogging platform had been contacted by one of USC’s lawyers, who had requested the site be taken down. The Roski administration released a statement justifying their move on the basis of copyright infringement and said the page could have been mistaken for an official one, since the school name and address appeared on the bottom of the blog. Taking down the blog, however, effectively removed public dissent.
The same collective of students has since reconstructed the same blog with a slightly different URL.
For the most part, the content of the blog includes pictures of M.F.A. students at work in the studio, of their completed projects and of informational posters about thesis topics and presentations. As a senior looking into graduate programs myself, albeit not M.F.A. programs, this is exactly the kind of information a prospective applicant might be interested in. The blog contained content curated by actual students going through the program, rather than carefully orchestrated advertising content put out by the University itself.
However, some of the content on the blog may have seemed subversive to the school’s administration, therefore heightening their interest in shutting it down. In addition to the letter from the incoming M.F.A. class which unanimously withdrew all the students’ enrollment, the blog posted a letter and petition addressed to the USC administration condemning its actions since the class’s withdrawal in May. The petition demands the resignation of Dean Erica Muhl and, as of September, it has received over 880 signatures.
The top of the post containing the letter to the administration reads “Demand USC’s accountability for its administrators’ actions. Sign the class of 2015’s petition now,” with the last sentence linking to the petition. Another post, entitled, “Letter to our Supporters,” expresses a desire for “greater transparency and equitability in the increasingly corporatized system of higher education.” Both the call for administrative accountability and the concern about increasingly corporatized higher education probably resonate with millions of other university students in the United States who are graduating with increasingly high rates of debt.
Whether one believes in online petitions as possible agents of social change, these posts are important public records of dissent. A university has everything to gain by portraying themselves in the most positive light, even if this sometimes means inaccurately conveying real experiences and, worse, erasing the voices of its actual students.
This upcoming Saturday, USC’s Visions & Voices program is scheduled to host a lecture and workshop on “Art as Social Practice,” which is apparently an appealing theory to the University in the context of neighborhood revitalization and community engagement — a relatively innocuous message aimed at a broad audience. But when students paying a salary’s worth of yearly income to study art try to make institutional changes, the role of artists as activists is apparently no longer appealing.
Kristen Woodruff is a senior majoring in classics. Her column, “Old School, New Tricks,” runs every other Wednesday.