Ruminations on a Renovation
or, An Ode to Mustard Yellow Walls & Purple Doors
This week’s Point was written by Jason Fasano, an Administrative Assistant in Wheatley Peters Hall and member of the Classified Staff Union. As always, The Point represents the views of the author and is not the official position of the FSU.
In the early 2000s there was an iconic Lebanese indie band that went by the name ‘Soapkills’ – a reference to the perception that Beirut’s post-Civil War reconstruction and beautification initiatives were erasing the physical evidence that the war had ever taken place at all, and therefore a critique of the ways in which this erasure of history was foreclosing necessary conversations about how to reckon with this past in order to move forward as a society.
I can’t help but think of Soapkills as I gaze upon the new coat of stark white paint recently applied to the walls in the upper floors of Wheatley Peters Hall (one of UMass Boston’s ‘heritage buildings’, part of the original campus constructed in the 1970s). What histories are being painted over? What lessons are being forgotten? And perhaps most urgently of all, what futures are being prevented from coming to fruition by this imposed forgetting?
These recent renovations included replacement of dilapidated ceiling tiles, installation of energy efficient light fixtures, and a fresh coat of paint in the corridors of the fourth floor – in other words, the scope of these renovations did not include work inside any of the offices, classrooms, laboratories, or lounge areas where students and employees spend the majority of our time. I do not mean to imply that we do not deserve nice things in Wheatley Peters Hall (the ceiling tiles were dilapidated after all), quite the contrary – I believe we all deserve to spend our time in nice spaces, not merely pass through them (the ceiling tiles inside the fourth floor’s offices and classrooms remain dilapidated).
I believe the misguided priorities regarding the content of these renovations is a direct result of the process through which they were conceived – a process which, to my knowledge, did not involve consultation with any faculty, staff, or students who actually spend time in this area. I often find myself wondering by what metric UMass Boston claims the title of ‘public’ university, when it continuously feels like there is no role for the public in any of the institutional decision-making processes that occur here.
On Thursday May 21st, staff members working on the fourth floor were informed that these renovations would be taking place – and given a one-week deadline to remove anything from the corridors that we’d like to preserve; anything remaining after Thursday May 28th would be disposed of. Notably, within this one-week period, Monday May 25th was Memorial Day (meaning the university was closed), and Wednesday May 27th and Thursday May 28th were the graduate and undergraduate commencement ceremonies (days that tend to be quite hectic). In other words, we were effectively given two working days of notice to accomplish this task.
One might reasonably ask: How hard could removing some old posters from a hallway really be? Recall that this building has been standing since the 1970s, and imagine how much history was hanging on these walls.
As one small example: The fourth floor was once home to the College of Public and Community Services (CPCS), a uniquely innovative school that prioritized serving non-traditional students by advancing a competency-based pedagogy which valued experiential learning and fostered meaningful partnerships with community organizations. CPCS officially closed in 2019 (although its faculty had been raising concerns about its future since long before then), but the hallways remained adorned with framed artwork memorializing various projects and initiatives that the College had overseen during its four-decade existence.
These are the kinds of institutional histories that are at risk of being painted over (or more accurately, being outright discarded) in the course of such beautification initiatives. My concerns about this painting-over of history are not merely about nostalgia for the past, but far more so about what these choices bode for the future of this institution. CPCS was an entity that concretely embodied the ‘urban mission’ that UMass Boston was founded upon – and its closure, and now its threatened erasure, are symbolic of the university’s drift away from this foundational ethos of serving the city’s public good. In 2022 the University officially rebranded (via a $1.5 million-dollar marketing campaign) to adopt the slogan “For the Times” – a phrase that some faculty charge represents an abdication of its obligation to be ‘for the city’, and which I have previously argued is so vacuous it means nothing at all.
But again, I don’t mean to imply that the denizens of Wheatley Peters Hall don’t deserve nice things – our campus is old, crumbling, and in desperate need of repairs and improvements. Nor do I intend to stand opposed to our university’s evolution into becoming something more than what it has thus far been. But I do feel the need to draw attention to the ways in which the idea of ‘progress’ has served to justify egregious harms throughout history, is often predicated upon an implicit hierarchy of better/lesser ways of knowing and being, and has historically been imbued with racialized assumptions about what actually constitutes ‘progress’.
I would therefore humbly suggest the pertinent question we ought to be asking ourselves at UMass Boston is not if we should be pursuing progress in the abstract, but about who gets to define what this ‘progress’ will look like: Progress on what terms? Progress on whose terms? And this question of forward progress is inextricable from how we engage with our past.
If Wheatley Peters Hall really is a ‘heritage’ building, how are we honoring, preserving, and stewarding that heritage?
And if we really are a public university, shouldn’t the public have a say in these conversations? Demanding stakeholder consultation in decisions about which walls to paint might seem like an odd hill to die on, but I believe this is merely a microcosm of a broader crisis of shared governance plaguing our university.
The committee for this year’s The Point currently includes Jessica Holden, Healey Library; Nick Juravich, History; Jeff Melnick, American Studies; and Steve Striffler, Labor Studies. If you want to write an edition of The Point, or if you just have an idea, please write us at fsu@umb.edu.