An account of life on the 2nd Floor of the JRC: The successes, the failures, and a tantalizing taste of reality.
By Solomon Miller On May 20, my world will end. I am moving halfway across the country, from small town Iowa to Washington, DC. My time at Grinnell will be history. My knowledge of Grinnell—of the personalities, of our administration, of SGA—will no longer matter in my daily life, and it will no longer be useful to Grinnell. When [2013] came to Grinnell, the student body was impassioned. The hate crime in Spring 2008 had riled up student activists to form AJust Grinnell and the No Limits Student Affairs in fall 2008 pit professors against administrators, publicly, as students watched or took sides. On issues such as supporting the SRC and building popularlysupported windmills to become more energy independent, administrators were not to be trusted. As a reporter for the S&B as a student activist was marked by BiasMotivated Incidents: homophobic vandalism on white boards, racist vandalism of an SGA campaign poster, Cunnilingus. The SRC, SOL, and scores of young idealists like me fought back with all-campus forums and chalk and posters professing our values of welcoming diversity and creating a supportive, loving community. It felt like I had joined the ranks in a battle of good vs. mean, good vs. negligent. On May 20, the students who entered my Grinnell will leave. Our problems, our politics, our understanding of self-gov (and all of those Grinnell buzzwords) will leave with us. After watching three classes graduate before
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us, I can comfortably say that the change we made as students will feel more like ripples than currents to next year’s freshmen. Our class personalities will live on as shadows, not monuments. Not everything is worthy of the history books. I don’t expect much wisdom will be lost if future students never understand our [love] of brackets, once Facebook fully replaces [Plans]. If the SGA Constitution gets trashed for a new one, it’s probably for the best. And I don’t want to hear another word about windmills at Grinnell. But I’ve got something to show for my four years here. In my manic pursuit of news for the S&B, political power to become SGA President, and the esteem of my classmates, I learned about how we, the Grinnell community, can learn to live with each other, and what we can get out of our four years here. What follows are the lessons I think Grinnell should remember. _____ Do your homework. I’m not talking about assignments for classes. Academics are important, and I wish I had spent more time on them, but that’s not my point. er was research. Before every big interview, I would learn as much as I could about the person I would soon meet. I wanted to know where they were coming from and who they knew that might be important to the story. During our conversation, I could tailor my
questions to the subjects they could speak on with authority. When they heard me mention some relevant fact from their past, sources would feel comfortable that I knew what I was doing as a reporter, and they would open up to me. The night before Dr. Raynard Kington was announced as our future college president, my editor got a hold of his name so I could prepare for the interview. I saw the impressed look on his face when I surprised him with a question about the social health issues he used to research. “Welcome to Grinnell,” I thought. “We do research here, too.” President Kington settled in, and he started giving public speeches about his transition to Grinnell. I noticed a few times that he cited a book by the former President of Princeton as his starting point for understanding his new job. A friend in SGA told me he talked about it even more in private and kept the book on his desk. That summer, I bought my own copy of dent. It’s still on my desk. It’s not a code book for predicting President Kington’s decisions, and he doesn’t always follow the author’s advice (the author opposes merit aid as socially unjust, for example). It did teach me how he thinks. It taught me how he makes decisions. I recognized some of the language he used and some of the processes he set up. That understanding found its way into my articles. It’s a good habit to keep. I don’t do much reporting anymore, but I still research people before professional meetings and always, always before anything that might turn into a
