Remembering the "Wall of Voices" (1997-1998)
Examining the history of an early physical social platform at Southwestern to understand the pursuit and limits of student expression on campus
The “Wall of Voices” was a bulletin board located in the old “Round Commons” that functioned as an anonymous forum to promote free speech amongst students from 1997-1998. Unlike today, where we have multiple avenues across social media for anonymous and non-anonymous community discourse, the Wall of Voices was organized in 1997 in the early stages of the internet, where the most accessible platform to discuss campus issues outside of a physical space was a published article or letter to the editor in The Megaphone.
The Wall was organized and maintained through the collaborative effort of a variety of student organizations including: the Progressive Student Alliance, EBONY, SOAL, and Latinos Unidos with seven faculty and staff members that served on a steering committee.
While some students were cynical about the Wall’s potential as a medium for anything more than crass jokes and petty arguments, others noticed its developing ability to spark conversations about the different social issues facing the campus at the time. Most notably, a post that discussed the negatives of Greek Life and its monopoly over the social opportunities for SU students led to multiple posts identifying the pros and cons of Greek Life at SU, inspiring a series of Op-ed’s in The Megaphone documenting the unique asynchronous evolution of the conversation across the student body.
In 1998, Karen Habib, a member of Counseling Services and the Steering Committee for The Wall of Voices, addressed the student body in a letter published by The Megaphone reinforcing its purpose as a medium for self-expression. But in the same message, she said that freedom of expression on the Wall was contingent: students could post anything on the Wall as long as it does not infringe on anyone’s rights or personal safety. Additionally, she stated that while The Wall is managed by a variety of student organizations, individual statements on the wall do not reflect “the beliefs or values of anyone on the Steering Committee, SU administrative staff, SU faculty, or anyone on the Board of Trustees.”
While the statement contents were obvious to the students who used The Wall, it reintroduces the question of how effective it was at promoting actual change outside of providing a place for students to voice their opinions. Even in that more limited role, it was short-lived. As the 1997-1998 year progressed, less and less discourse was documented on the Wall. In February the Steering Committee mourned the loss of its initial hype, and acknowledged it still had the potential to succeed, so they began advertising more student positions in an attempt to infuse the project with new energy. But by the end of the year, the Wall appears to have been taken down.
Learning and documenting the brief history of The Wall of Voices was an interesting process for me to conduct in 2024. As I stated in the introduction of this entry, the SU community today has a multitude of media platforms to discuss campus issues synchronously and asynchronously, yet as these opportunities have increased digitally, the last few generations of students have fostered this nostalgia for physical media that has increased its social value within certain contexts.
While one might argue that online discourse is much more effective at promoting change by voicing opinions to many more people to affirm the strength of their argument through an increasing number of likes, comments, and shares, something about the tangibility of voicing these perspectives through Post-it notes and graffiti on a literal sounding board transcends the quantitative data provided by social media by suggesting that voicing your opinions in a tangible manner improves the likelihood of receiving tangible results.
We see this in the more social-justice-related example of the graffiti on the admissions building in 2023 fighting to acknowledge the injustice faced by racially oppressed groups on campus, and in a more social sense where students mark their place at SU by reinforcing the social importance of the Graffiti Bridge as an un-institutionalized community space.
While I don’t personally see a revamped version of The Wall of Voices succeeding any time in the future, I feel that appreciating its presence as part of the evolution of student community discourse at Southwestern will help us understand how the medium of a message shapes its potential effects and affects.
