To the Editor:
Our voices have been totally disregarded in the planning of the new residential colleges.
The administration doesn’t seem to care that current Yale students understand the Yale experience in a way that alums (whose memories fade) and administrators (who disappear after dark) don’t. So here’s a reason that they should care about: We’re future alums.
Over the past year, we’ve watched an arrogant show of manufactured consent, where our voices have been counted, recorded and hastily dismissed. President Richard Levin’s letter doesn’t even mention the broad student opposition to this plan. The faculty report attempts to mitigate the fact that 70 percent of respondents oppose the proposed site by claiming a lack of respondents; perhaps it was due to the fact that President Levin has always been largely disinterested in student opinion. Of course people were discouraged from responding to the survey; what else would one expect when the administration has repeatedly insisted that they know student opinion in one breath, while dismissing it in the next?
I do support building two new colleges. But Yale should know that when it next asks us for something — the contents of our wallets — we’ll be far more skeptical.
David Kasten
Feb. 18
The writer is a senior in Jonathan Edwards College