Censorship or Patronage

Today I was informed that the War­dens at my hall wanted to see me and a friend Charlie about some­thing that we had pro­posed to pub­lish in the Halls’ news-sheet. OK, I thought, we go to the meet­ing, have a reas­on­able dis­cus­sion about what was writ­ten. Full and frank. What Charlie wrote was, to be fair, pos­sibly con­tro­ver­sial; the article’s sub­ject was our sub-wardens here in halls, and their enforce­ment of dis­cip­line. We had even already dis­cussed tak­ing it out ourselves, and were real­istic about the pos­sib­il­ity of being asked to remove it. Remov­ing the art­icle didn’t par­tic­u­larly bother us, it was almost pre­dict­able. What bothered me was how we were asked to remove it.

I am a real­ist. I’m not writ­ing for an inde­pend­ent pub­lic­a­tion (what pub­lic­a­tion, after all, can ever be inde­pend­ent from its fund­ing?), I write for a news­let­ter in a hall of res­id­ence. Obvi­ously I don’t expect to be under­tak­ing ground­break­ing invest­ig­at­ive journ­al­ism. I don’t even expect, although it would be nice, to be able to write what I like. What I do expect though is cour­tesy. If, when we were summoned, we had been taken into the office, sat down, and talked to like adults, I would have been happy. If I had been politely told the the art­icle was inap­pro­pri­ate, or in some way under­mined the com­munity that we essen­tially work for, I would equally politely have removed it. I like to think that I’m a reas­on­able person.

This is not what happened though. Hav­ing been asked to go and see the war­dens at a cer­tain time, we were promptly informed upon arriv­ing that this meet­ing could not be coun­ted as “offi­cial” — an idea which in itself rein­forces the points made within the art­icle about author­ity within halls of res­id­ence being too offi­cious to be respec­ted. And why could it not be offi­cial? Because the warden refused to speak to “the press” (no really, that’s how he referred to us) without the second warden also being present. He con­tin­ued to delve into tech­nic­al­it­ies of the art­icle – such as that we used the term “warden” instead of “sub-warden” – say­ing that the art­icle was ill-researched (pos­sibly true, but it is non­ethe­less an opin­ion, a point of view) and gave the halls “no right of reply”.

I will hap­pily con­cede that some fair points were made: we as stu­dents often don’t know what goes on behind the scenes. Usu­ally because we are not privy to it, mind; there is a start­ling lack of dia­logue between the residence’s man­age­ment and its occu­pi­ers — the warden we talked to even said that many stu­dents prob­ably wouldn’t know who he was. What really riled me was not the request to delete the con­tent, but the man­ner in which (or per­haps bet­ter, the lack of man­ners with which) this demand was made. It was even sug­ges­ted that if we wanted to pub­lish it then the halls could respond with their own art­icle, in the same edi­tion, which showed that Charlie’s art­icle was, in the words of the warden, “crap”. It is hard to believe that any­one who refers to another’s writ­ing or work thus can go on to make accus­a­tions of inflam­mat­ory or defam­at­ory language.

So here it boils down to the title of the post. I would argue that what has happened today was cen­sor­ship, whereas if we had been asked politely, I would have said pat­ron­age. Here are the defin­i­tions, along with the art­icle in full: I leave you to decide:

cen­sor­ship |ˈsensərˌ sh ip|
noun
the prac­tice of offi­cially examin­ing books, movies, etc., and sup­press­ing unac­cept­able parts.

pat­ron­age |ˈpatrənij; ˈpā-|
noun
the power to con­trol appoint­ments to office or the right to privileges.

Cats, Rats and Dogs

I am ter­ri­fied of rats. I have tried to trace the fear back to some repressed event in my child­hood, to apply a Freu­dian rationale to my fear, to under­stand where it comes from, but I can­not. All I know is that they scare the liv­ing shit out of me. Ima­gine, then, my ter­ror at encoun­ter­ing a scur­ry­ing, long-tailed, beady-eyed mem­ber of the spe­cies here in Devon­shire. He was prowl­ing around the bins out­side the kit­chens and as much as I would love to say I faced my fear with dig­nity, I am bound to con­fess that I (lit­er­ally) ran away screaming.

Earlier that day, I’d had a far pleas­anter animal encounter, in the shape of a black cat that has taken to fre­quent­ing a friend’s kit­chen when the win­dow is open. I’m sure many of you have seen the same cat (I pre­sume she belongs to someone liv­ing on Cum­ber­land Road) and I recom­mend you intro­duce your­self next time, as she is a very pleas­ant cat. She is called Kin­ski and has a pen­chant for mature ched­dar and Chilean wine.

The uncanny thing about all this is that, the night before meet­ing the cat and the rat, I had a dream in which a black cat was hunt­ing rats in my liv­ing room. Very odd indeed. I won­der what Freud would make of that one? On second thoughts, I’d rather not know.

Any­way, I was very con­cerned for the cat’s safety today (the real cat, not the dream one). I saw it sit­ting on a win­dow sill lick­ing his paws in that self-indulgent man­ner all cats have, when an officer of Devonshire’s ludicrously unne­ces­sary ‘Dog Sec­tion’ strode past with his bear-sized Ger­man Shep­herd. Now don’t get me wrong– I am a dog per­son (cats have a secret­ive air that makes me sus­pi­cious of their inten­tions, whereas dogs have an endear­ing stu­pid­ity that implies no ulterior motive in their bestow­ing affec­tion on us) but Kin­ski, as I have said, is a par­tic­u­larly cool cat, and I knew she wouldn’t stand a chance against such a mon­ster dog. Thank­fully little Kin­ski man­aged to keep her­self hid­den and the dog was none the wiser.

The dis­pro­por­tion between little cat and giant dog seemed to illus­trate rather nicely the slightly over­blown approach to dis­cip­line we’ve all encountered in one form or another here at Devon­shire (tenu­ous link I know, but bear with me read­ers, I’ve been want­ing to have a bit of a rant against ‘the man’ for a while now and this being the last edi­tion before Christ­mas I thought it was about time).

The usual com­plaints lev­elled against our war­dens are that they are kill-joys and have an obses­sion with keep­ing noise levels down to an inaud­ible whis­per. Both are true. But if we were all very hon­est, I think it can be admit­ted (whis­per it) that most of the time when a warden tells you to quieten down its fair enough. At any given time quite a few people are just try­ing to get some much-needed sleep.

How­ever, the heavy-handedness with which some war­dens take their dis­cip­lin­ary roles often seems tact­less. Far too often, a situ­ation which could have been settled by com­mon sense and reas­on­able dis­cus­sion ends up with the tak­ing of names and fil­ing of a report. The insist­ence on tak­ing names is wholly unne­ces­sary in what are gen­er­ally isol­ated incid­ents and is often dis­crim­in­at­ory against the indi­vidu­als who had the decency to talk to the warden. And we all know by now that ‘fil­ing a report’ means a dis­cip­lin­ary meet­ing, your name going into a file and you hav­ing to walk on egg shells for the rest of the year to avoid a fine.
I’d be temp­ted not to give my name know­ing this, and oth­ers have felt the same, lead­ing to need­less argu­ments in which the warden demands a name ‘for the report’, and the poor sod who decided to act as spokes­per­son for their group is reluct­ant to have all the blame placed on them, so refuses. This has been noted in reports as ‘unco­oper­at­ive’ and even ‘aggress­ive’ behaviour.

Mean­while the dis­cip­lin­ary meet­ings them­selves strike a some­what inap­pro­pri­ate tone. With pen­cils scratch­ing out your every word for the record and stony expres­sions all round, they’re more like inter­rog­a­tions than dis­cus­sions between ten­ant and landlord.

In my exper­i­ence a more relaxed approach to dis­cip­line amongst stu­dents is far more con­du­cive to a pleas­ant res­id­en­tial atmo­sphere than this cul­ture of name tak­ing and report fil­ing. In such a cul­ture the man­age­ment become some­thing your every­day res­id­ent feels unable to com­mu­nic­ate with on any human level. The major­ity of war­dens seem to me to be bound by the bur­eau­cratic dis­cip­lin­ary struc­ture into being inflex­ible– and thus they lose the respect of the res­id­ents in their charge. I accept that if a ser­i­ous offence is made, dis­cip­lin­ary action has to be taken bey­ond a simple telling off at the scene. But so often the rigid­ity of the pro­ced­ures in place does away with com­mon sense and leads to gross over­re­ac­tions, unne­ces­sary dis­cip­lin­ary meet­ings, a sense of per­se­cu­tion amongst Dev res­id­ents and all in all leaves an unpleas­ant stain upon what is oth­er­wise a won­der­ful Hall to live in.
Charlie Cooper

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1. Let’s be censor-ble
2. Fiesta, Siesta, Fiesta