Deirdre Winberg ’92
Let’s be honest. Getting into Smith isn’t all that difficult. […] The hardest thing about Smith is figuring out how to pay for it, and since Smith went need-blind, that has knee-capped more than a few women who undoubtedly were disappointed by the admissions decision they received.
I’ll be clear: getting into Smith was not a cake walk for me personally. I was wait listed, […] but still desperately held out hope that Smith would accept me. Accept me they did, and I fondly recall the day I got the thin little letter telling me my long wait was finally over.
That was a long time ago. There’s been a couple times since — not many — that I haven’t been all that psyched about Smith. Once was when, as a student, I heard Catherine MacKinnon speak at Rally Day. […] Catherine MacKinnon pissed me off that day because she told us that in some way we were all responsible for that student having taken her life. I remember my reaction was, ‘what, back in the 60s? I wasn’t even alive. She’s a nut.’ I don’t recall every speech I heard at Smith, but I remember that one. You are responsible for something that happened in the community of your school […]
Thirty years is long time. For the bulk of those thirty years I have been pretty happy about my association with the school.
[…]
When I found out that someone had called the cops on a Smith student of color, my initial reaction was one of genuine disbelief, in a “that would never happen at Smith” type of way.
First, because it’s embarrassing and second because that’s simply not the Smith that I know. […] The college’s reactions only served, in my mind, to make the situation substantially worse.
The replies to the community, and what Smith College allowed to occur on its behalf. To wit: approximately two weeks after the initial incident, racist trolls were allowed to post, unchecked, over and over on the college’s official Facebook page. […]
[…] [T]he one thing I have taken from these events is that above all, Smith has become the place where it is more than evident that people who say that white women don’t care about issues that affect women of color are exactly right. If a white woman had been harassed or victimized on the Smith campus, there would be an outcry […]
There would be an outcry of pretty epic proportions. I say that confidently because I have seen it firsthand.
I was raped on the Smith campus when I was a first year student. I had been at a party and wanted to head back to my house before my friends. […] Of course it was no fault of anyone at Smith that this had happened to me, but it was unfathomable to me at the time that this was something that I could make part of my past instead of a lifetime defining moment.
I spent about a week at home. During that time, Smith made it very well known to me and my family that they did not want me to leave the school, […] The administration was transparent, they were conciliatory, they were sorry, and they were embarrassed. […]
Smith set me up with a plan to help me heal and move forward. I was given the opportunity (which I took) to work with a psychiatrist on an individual basis, as well as group therapy […]. It wasn’t so much an “opportunity” as it was the thing I would need to do should I decide to return to Smith.
I drove back to Northampton with my mother. On the way I told her I had decided I was going to get the rest of my stuff from my dorm and go back to Rhode Island with her. […]
I don’t know much about what happened on campus during the week I was home, but when we got to Northampton, there was a sea — and I mean a sea — of people in the streets, holding candles. I couldn’t reasonably say how many, but the crowd stretched from the Grecourt gates almost to King Street.
Women, men and women, silently holding candles in the first Take Back the Night March that I had ever seen or heard of. I clearly remember my mother pulling the car over and looking at me and saying, “this is for you.”
Anyway, I didn’t leave Smith. My seventeen-year-old mind didn’t process all that much, but I was smart enough to know that that type of unbridled support simply didn’t exist in my hometown.
There’s something about being a Smith student and a Smith alum that makes you believe, and hope, that you are not like other girls. […] They have chosen a different path for a good reason. […] Whatever the reason, we all had them.
There’s a stark reality that Smithies need to face, and that is that we are not different from anywhere or anyone else. For the first time that I can recall, Smith is exactly on trend with something. That something just so happens to be empowered racism. […] If Catherine MacKinnon is to be believed, I have a part in that.
Smith has shown me over the course of this summer who they are […]. Their reaction, their lack of reaction, and the new normal at Smith has made me believe it’s time to stop fighting College Hall.
This is who you are. I’ll use what you give me. So don’t try to tell me later that Smith isn’t really like this when yes, it really is. That’s why you can have my diploma.
Do yourselves a favor. If you want the world to believe that Smith women aren’t like everyone else in the world right now, prove them wrong.
