Author: Henry Dickmeyer
It’s no secret that Jonathan Veitch was named Occidental’s newest president in 2009 to return political and philosophical integrity to the school. After all, he has been the college’s fifth president in the last decade. Formely dean of an equally progressive school, Eugene Lang College, the native Angelino – the first in Occidental’s history – returned to his home city with the intention to stay at the president’s house for “at least 10 years,” according to a Los Angeles Times profile. At 50 years old, the president was ready to finally settle down at an institution.
Now turn back the clock to when President Remsen Bird (1921-1946) assumed the position at the young age of 33. President Bird oversaw students with their families and friends battling the Great Depression back home and the Third Reich across the Atlantic. He wrote in his later years, “I loved people, all kinds of them… And helping solve the complicated problems of persons enmeshed in difficulties soon became for me the most satisfying of all.”
People don’t become the presidents of elite universities by expressing this raw appreciation for the humanities anymore. Rather than being hired for their love of poetry or prose, today’s presidents are established moneymakers: former CEOs, venture capitalists and former government officials who pervade short lists for who’s in line to be the face of an academic institution.
President Veitch is the middle ground between the two, and very few voices appear to be defending him in his position. Instead the cost of his slipups have yielded an excommunicative attitude towards President Veitch; that a man who said Splatter was a “humiliation” and has reprimanded the methods of communication used by the Oxy Sexual Assault Coalition’s (OSAC), should be disgraced for the mistakes made under his administration.
The latest examples of disconnect between students and President Veitch occurred over Founder’s Day weekend. When President Veitch walked through the Quad on Friday night, allies and survivors at the Sleepover for Sexual Assault Awareness were distraught to see that the president was intent on spending the night. Rather than inviting President Veitch to partake in late night dialogue, students and parents grumbled, approached him directly and respectfully asked him to leave.
Saturday night, a student-organized candlelit vigil gathered outside the Greek Bowl to greet exiting guests from the Founder’s Dinner and allow them to recognize OSAC’s paramount cause. Instead, President Veitch and several other guests took the back exit. The result was two letters to the editor and a pejorative attitude towards a president who looked as if he was deliberately disrespecting survivors of sexual assault.
Now I am not invalidating OSAC’s discontentment. OSAC’s requests, demands, discussions and paperwork have been in the works since March 2007. When students found out about a sexual assault in February from KABC-TV rather than Dean Barbara Avery, the time came for OSAC to amplify its message, and justly so. But in President Veitch’s email response to OSAC’s March 1 protest, OSAC’s message became clear: this isn’t an issue of notification, but of the fundamental inner workings of the Occidental administration. The partnership building between students and the administration came to an abrupt halt.
And OSAC has not just used Occidental’s sexual assault prevelance to start a national conversation. Swarthmore, UNC Chapel Hill and Yale have verified the abysmal process through which many universities go to handle sexual assault. OSAC, regardless of how the administration responds, has put the issue of sexual assault under a long overdue microscope. This case, rather, has magnified how Occidental handles failure: when the interests and ideals of disgruntled students and administrators are at odds.
Instead, students tend to miss the inherently bureaucratic nature of university politics. This feels particularly true at Occidental, where dissatisfaction with resources and services run in each and every student’s blood. College presidents are hired with money in mind, albeit with consideration of their academic philosophy. The president develops a strong relationship with the Board of Trustees and attracts well-endowed alumni to donate, leaving a natural disconnect between the president and the student body. Everything else falls under the realm of task delegation. It’s only natural for students to feel dissatisfied, their voices only heard by a fraction of the lower tiers of the administration.
But amidst campus contempt of everything from the alcohol to the sexual assault policies, it has been very easy to blame “the administration.” And almost four years since President Veitch came to Occidental, not much seems to have changed. Emmons still thinks every other patient is pregnant, room draw is still ripe with inefficiencies, nobody goes to the football games and campus safety will still break up a Friday night “party” in Stewie.
And sexual assault was, and still is, put on the backburner of administrative responsibilities.
When it comes down to it, the problem isn’t President Veitch. President Veitch walked onto campus after Jamie Hoffman first received complaints regarding John Sweet’s alleged sexual misconduct; Dean Avery hadn’t taken meaningful action on the issue of sexual assault; and students were still facing rising financial costs and teachers coping with outdated classroom media. Occidental’s current president entered the school during periods of recession and administrative fluctuations and was bestowed with the task of establishing stability. Is it effective to place the brunt of the blame on President Veitch?
The next step for the Occidental community is to instead see President Veitch as the person who must lift the college out of its clamorousness. Because if there’s any way a college president is like a high school principal, it’s that an effective principal needs time to adjust to a school’s systemic issues. With every obstacle inherited from the last decade at Occidental, a removal of President Veitch from his post would be like firing a public school teacher for having inadequate textbooks, taking the fall for other administrators’ shortcomings. He must be transparent about what’s on his desk and hold his administration accountable for their inaction, knowing the consequences of letting emotional reactivity get the best of him. President Veitch and his administration must be the ones who bridge the gap between them and the student body, as opposed to waiting for things to go wrong and then saving face.
It’s in Occidental’s nature to have the administration and student body bicker with one another; for students to approach multiple levels of the Occidental hierarchy with an intrinsic kind of vivacity and concern. But what happened, happened; and what’s done is done. President Veitch is no Remsen Bird, but we must give him due time to see if he can be.
Henry Dickmeyer is a sophomore economics major. He can be reached at dickmeyer@oxy.edu.
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