It begins with the architecture. The most enduring legacy of this Carleton administration will be the radical reshaping of townhouses and buildings around campus, and it is hard to describe to those who were not there how different those houses and communal spaces used to be. The little things like how the interior spaces used to be connected without long hallways to interrupt flow, or how there used to be more windows to cool down the house when there were too many bodies in one room. Everything is cramped and awkward now, the walls themselves whispering, “Admin, admin, admin…” in their sterility and non-communal design. These were projects that were not constructed with any input from the students who used to live there, or students in general. It was decided one day that everything must go, and so it went. What stands there now acts as a facsimile to the vibrancy of those spaces, and is an indicator of the potential path that Carleton is heading down, a future of sanitization and smooth edges with nothing concrete to hold on to. There is nowhere to go on campus where the spaces themselves do not announce the presence of the overseeing administration. 

This restriction of student spaces goes beyond dorm spaces too, of course. Huge events were held in the main Sayles space such as the Drag Show and Synchrony II as recently as 2023, but as soon as the reconstruction of Sayles happened, that space magically disappeared for use by students. Going back through the Carletonian archives, this is not the first time this has happened either. Weekly dances happened in Sayles before they were moved to Cowling, where they died an ignoble death as one of the many Carleton traditions killed off through a denial of access. With the Drag Show, which used to bring in crowds of hundreds of [JUMP] students into Sayles, now limited to the Chapel and the Cave, and with Synchrony II cramming audience members like sardines into the claustrophobic Great Hall, are they too to share the same fate? Instead of proudly celebrating these parts of queer and artistic life at Carleton, they seem to be sidelined in favor of keeping all the chairs and tables in perfect order for the prospective students to gawk at. What’s the point of trying to cultivate community when it is stonewalled by an endless bureaucracy of offices and departments passing the buck in an endless game of ‘let’s wait till the people who remember better things graduate’?

Let us not forget the meal plan and the slow death of communal meals as points of gathering for students. In a noble quest to stave off food insecurity on campus (which oddly does not extend to summer student workers), the administration rid students of the ability to choose whether they wanted to opt-in to Carleton’s meal plans and instead made it mandatory for everyone. I was present at the infamous CSA meeting where the Dean of Student Life questioned whether people really needed food to form connections. The impact of punishing students who do not live in dorms with a mandatory seven-meal plan in addition to having to purchase groceries has predictably made it significantly more difficult to create communities that are not beholden to BonApp and the administration for their food. This, of course, impacts students of color whose cultural dishes have never really been done justice by the dining halls but also beyond that, the point of interest houses, such as Culinary (the hint being in the name) and Carleton’s Association of Nature and Outdoor Enthusiasts (CANOE), were to create bonds between students through shared collaboration on meals among other things. But that can no longer happen without Carleton getting a slice of the pie. Once again, students cannot exist without the interference of administration making the social fabric of Carleton burdensome and convoluted.

There is an inherent tension between the Carleton of today and the Carleton of the past. I remember the fossil fuel divestment protests from my freshman year. I saw the marches, the sit-ins, the interruptions of Trustee meetings and the amount of effort that students put into them. It’s hard to believe, but there was someone who dressed up as a parody of a member of the Board of Trustees, made a whole series of videos mocking them and ended it with a phenomenal performance at that year’s Drag Show to cap it all off. It was a student-led movement animated by the community and a shared sense of being complicit in something deeply wrong, and it was quite the sight to see. One summer ago, as part of an admitted students event, the administration put up posters in Anderson rewriting the events of the divestment protests as a decision that they took spontaneously to be more in line with their environmental goals, cutting the students out of the picture entirely. Carleton wants to be a school of progress without the messiness and conflict that comes with change. The removal of the student action into the faceless and more nebulous ‘Carleton’ brand filters down into an increasingly voiceless and disempowered student body that has everything decided for them. I’m not entirely sure why the administration bothers with perfunctory appearances at the Carleton Student Association (CSA), as the direction of Carleton’s future seems entirely out of our hands. 

I think back to the article published in The “New York Times” and the way it framed Carleton. We are the wholesome quirky “cookie house” college and not a “frat house” campus like other schools are. But, as important as the wholesome quirkiness is to the Carleton identity, the other side of that identity in student independence and informal community-building is what was left out of the face that the administration presented to the world. It’s the parties that keep getting shut down, the raunchy dances and plays we put on and everything else we manage in the small gaps of time in between work and sleep. Under this new frame of a “wholesome” Carleton, what other parts of Carleton have to be softened to make it more marketable? Will streaking, a word literally invented here, be cracked down upon? Will the administration finally succeed in killing Rotblatt to minimize liability? Will the CLAP be formally reprimanded out of existence? In the endless quest to sanitize and neuter the less-publicizable parts, at what point do we legislate out of existence the special stuff that makes Carleton, Carleton, as opposed to a washed out copy of a copy of a platonic “liberal arts college”?

I am not positive about the direction Carleton is headed as an institution. The unilaterality of the decisions mentioned in this article and all the ones I have not had the time to write about here points to an attitude of infantilization within the administration, where students cannot be trusted to do what is best for themselves and so must instead be fenced in. We’re not perfect, and we do incredibly stupid things sometimes. But for our autonomy, communal bonds and expression to be sidelined as part of a larger push for a ‘softer’ or ‘safer’ Carleton is both ridiculous and depressing to have witnessed over the past four years. You can never impose a culture, only fake one. And Carleton’s feeling pretty fake to me these days.