 Welcome to Town Meeting Television, home of community media. I am here with the Gadfly Collective, or members of the Gadfly Collective. Yay! So excited to have you here. Let's have just a quick go around, maybe tell me your name and a little bit about how you got involved in the Gadfly. How did you find each other? Well, first, I mean, people don't know what the Gadfly is, so tell us what is the Gadfly? The Gadfly is a leftist alternative student newspaper on campus that we just reintroduced after a long hiatus. It was originally started in 85 and went up until 97, and I discovered it last spring, last January, I think. Accidentally, a librarian told me about it, and the rest is history. So your name is Purva, right? Yes. And you ran and you came into special collections and started perusing old issues of the Gadfly. And what stood out to you? What made you excited about it? It was definitely different from what did exist on campus then, which was and still continues to be the cynic. I specifically, well, I went there because I had just found out about the cakewalk, and I was like, whoa, no one really talks about this. I wonder what the cynic has to say. Not a lot of nice things, I'd say. And I was taken aback and shocked, and I was going through it, and I guess a librarian saw me and was like, have you heard of the Gadfly? And I was like, no, what is it? And he brought me the little folder, and I went through it, and I was immediately in love, and I really liked how they covered issues on campus either differently or that were just not in the cynic, and I enjoyed their writing style, and it was, I mean, alternative in the end. It was especially related to campus activism. I could definitely see that the members were involved in their community, and as someone who is involved in my community, I could almost relate to them, and their, I guess, experiences almost because a lot of us have gone through the same things or continuing the same struggles. Great. How did you find the Gadfly, and what's your involvement in this? So I'm Katie, and I founded, or refounded as we found out, and I run the Disabled Student Union on campus with Kira Malone and Lily Olson, and I came to a meeting with these guys just to kind of meet everyone, and they were talking about starting up the Gadfly, and I was like, what? What's a Gadfly? And yeah, I got pretty much the explanation for what they gave, and it sounded really interesting. I liked that there was a new alternative voice kind of starting up or restarting on campus and then just stuck around ever since. They've been really helpful with the union, we've been helpful with them, and it's nice to be part of both organizations. What's the Disabled Student Union hope to affect on? What kind of changes do you hope to make on the campus? So we're aiming to provide a kind of a combination of like a social and community space and also an activism space, so people can kind of use, they can get out of it what they need to. Some people come to us just saying, hey, I feel very isolated, I don't really know what to do, some people are saying, hey, I want to get involved with disability activism, where do I start? So we're a little bit of a catch-all, but we exist to kind of hold the university accountable, to hold student accessibility services accountable, and to make sure that disabled students have a space for us because there wasn't one before. So how have you seen at local community events, city council meetings, Aspen, tell us a little bit about your involvement in Gadfly and how you come to be involved in community politics. Yeah, so I got involved with kind of our parent, I guess parent organization, UVMU students back when I first came on campus in September, I think, 2021, and I was just immediately, I just was immediately hooked from, I believe it was an action about Sodexo and how our current dining provider, who's been there for 60 years, has a real sweetheart deal, and it's not a great company and the way they treat the workers is really, is just not great. And yeah, I was hooked in by that, and since then I've kind of fallen down the rabbit hole with the Sears Lane encampment and the defense of that, which is such a current issue as well. And I just kind of went from there. The Sears Lane really got me involved as well as the current issues with Ali House's election and subsequently the fight for police accountability with Proposition 7 and 8 that unfortunately failed this most recent March. Yeah, and that's how I've been involved, and yeah. And Mack, you're wearing Will Miller's Justice Lecture Series t-shirt, and Will Miller was one of the mentors to many of the folks who worked on the gadfly. You want to talk a little bit about how you got involved? Sure. I arrived on campus during the peak of COVID, so we were all pretty separated and I didn't really know what was going on, and I had been involved with some youth climate activism when I was younger. And then I showed up here, had a bad first semester, and then the beginning of the following year I still didn't know that many people, and so I was walking around campus and I saw a poster for an event called Community Fest, which is something that was thrown by the UVM Mutual Aid group that was around at the time. And they were doing mutual aid work and connecting the local community to campus organizations and just generally doing whatever they felt like doing. And I thought it looked cool, and then I got involved with them, involved with the local Food Not Cops group and a couple other groups around town, and then later that semester, Sears Lane became a thing, or not became a thing, but caught the attention of everyone around town and hung out there, supported where I could, and then just got pretty heavily involved with the mutual aid work on campus. And then we were doing like a support action for the staff union last year when Porva brought up to us that she had been reading a bunch of old Gadfly articles, and we were like, what's the Gadfly? And she was like, let me tell you, and she pulled up her computer and just had like a ton of Gadfly articles that she had saved, and we were like, oh, this is so cool. We should do something like that. We were like, how would we do it? We spent all this time figuring it out, and then we spent the past year figuring out how to start our own little student newspaper. Awesome. I'm Sam. It's my first year here at UVM, so I don't have too much under my belt yet, but I got introduced this September to the Union of Students, and from there we did a lot of different things. But about last semester, we started getting serious about wanting to start writing articles and getting everything together to publish a Gadfly, and I've been working the entire time just trying to put stuff out, and I'm happy we're out right now. So I talked to a former Gad... You all got to meet some former Gadfly heads, or Gadheads, as we probably know, Gadfly ends. And I talked to somebody, so I'm going to meet with a group of students who are restarting the Gadfly, and what would you ask them? And he said, ask them how they came to be enamored with the idea of altering human suffering that is alterable. And so I wonder if you can dig down, because you've come together in community, and I think one of the things that you heard from one of the former Gadfly folks was if all you do is take away from this experience and your own growth and your own growth in community with each other, just value how precious that is. How did you feel like you came to this idea that you could make a change in the world to alter suffering that can be altered? It's a big question. I would say it's harder to believe that it's impossible to change that, because all of this, there's so much amazing stuff that humans can do, like so much beautiful art, so much capacity for love and kindness, and so much capacity for thought and insight and beauty, and the idea that this is it and this is the best the world can get, I don't think any of us can accept that. When we look around and we see just how rough it is, it's harder to accept that's possible to change for me. Yeah, that was definitely my mindset going into the Gadfly collective and also just campus activism in general. It was hard for me to stay silent or to pretend like all this stuff wasn't going on, and I've definitely been that way since the beginning, but I think going into college when you have much more freedom of expression and you're not, I mean there are less consequence, well there definitely are consequences for them, but you do have the ability to speak up and talk about the things that do matter. I think it would be, I would lose a part of my soul if I like looked the other way almost. I was gonna say, I think it's a thing that started at least for me is the moment I developed empathy. It was always like I had to look around and understand that so many people were suffering where they didn't have to be and what kind of person would I be if I didn't try and do something about that and now that I've come to UVM and I look around and I see all of us united in the same struggle facing the same problems. I think it's only natural that I'm disgruntled and I'm prepared to do something about it. College as well is like one of the first times that a lot of people get the chance to do something. A lot of us have done other activism stuff before but a lot of people haven't because there hasn't been something in their area. There hasn't been something they've been comfortable getting involved with. And so Union students, Mutual Aid, Gadfly now kind of provides an opportunity to do something and then see the results of that something instead of just signing another petition and then waiting ten years for something we can actually change something. Also it's easier to believe when we have won before and we've, seriously, it was not a total win but we were able to keep an encampment open and keep people able to live in their own homes or the makeshift homes they built for months. We won with a staff union contract. We camped out for a week. We fought really hard and we won. Union can look differently. Even the petition that we've made I think my first semester on campus it got the attention of Reslife and it got the attention of people higher up in the admin and sometimes that visibility and them feeling threatened almost does feel like a win because we're doing something great to I don't know I can't go off that one I don't know what to say after that I agree. Well it's good to recognize successes as you have them along the way and must also be difficult because you're in, you know you're balancing study, life, maybe work meeting new people traversing new environments growing with this attempt, this work to change the world. So, what are some of the things that you're focusing on? What are the issues that you're focusing on at campus but also in the stories that you're going to write at the CADFIRE have been writing? I co-founded Students Against Institutional Violence with Sid Parton the beginning of last semester but it was like a thing in the works and we finally named the organization. It's an informal group, we're not recognized we don't plan to be recognized but our students Against institutional violence save UVM and our mission is to eradicate Greek life and existing forms of violence at campus these violences being white supremacy patriarchy racism sexism ableism rape culture, the list goes on and UVM loves to advertise itself as a non-Greek life school when maybe the membership isn't as much compared to bigger schools out there but it is definitely still relevant on campus and it also depends on how you define how much an organization or institution is active on campus because it pretty much is or it very much is they have events every week, they host parties where people get drugged and raped and assaulted and the admin love to pretend like nothing's going on which is crazy because they do know they're just afraid to admit it and to lose their money because if there wasn't violence in Greek life they wouldn't be hosting all of these panels and town halls and asking students to not go to unrecognized groups on campus there wouldn't be a sexual assault prevention task force committee assigned to Greek life so that's one of the issues that I speak about on campus Sid and I also carry our signs every day mine says and the violence and Sid says UVM hid my rape but yeah radical visibility is our thing and we plan to do much more in the coming years and have you written about that I'm working on it I'm working on it I do want to I've been reading a lot of feminist literature lately and I want to make this perfect I don't want to just talk because we've distributed literature we've distributed these pamphlets and we've talked about it Greek life sucks this is pretty common knowledge but I do want to go into depth about the actual harms and how they aid people even past graduation the networks and the political affiliation of members and it's a huge rabbit hole it did the effects of Greek life surpass university life for sure I also want to say Empowering Survivors published a really powerful and beautiful piece which isn't directly about Greek life but it's about the broader pattern of UVM inaction on sexual assault and preventing that yeah that's an issue too of the Godfly Empowering Survivors is an anonymous Instagram account run by members who are also anonymous and hence the anonymous Instagram account and it was started in 2021 when I guess I want to say the first big protest against sexual assault on campus happened in May of 2021 I wasn't on campus then but I did watch the UVM US Instagram live stream which is how I found out about UVM US and sexual assault the prevalence of sexual assault on campus and yeah so they started an account and they post anonymous stories of from members of the community and mostly students and it's really depressing to look at but it's so powerful I think to give students the ability to share their story anonymously without any repercussions or having to go through the brutal process of Title IX and reporting and all of that to students in alternative to all of that like you don't necessarily or like it gives control over survivor stories so I do want to ask about why you're using paper zines newspapers to talk about issues because you bring up that you bring up Instagram and we're in a community, we're in a culture of media true but I also want to give a chance if there are other issues that you want to talk about and then also how these issues interface with one another you mentioned a lot of patriarchy, racism sexism, rape culture how are you seeing that how these issues interact with each other so we see a lot of different issues really intersect with each other in a lot of different ways and we can identify these things and we learn about them in our classes and that's a big thing that is discussed now is how environmental justice is a class that's taught and it becomes very core to a lot of stuff we study where it's like racism and pollution go hand in hand in that neighborhood that is predominantly black is going to be polluted at if they're at the same income level so it's not just about class but it's also about race and we can see all these different intersections in our daily lives to the paper comment we have like Instagrams for the groups that we were in before and you know we'll post on Instagram but end of the day the only people who are really going to see the Instagram stories we make are people who are following our account and look at it semi-regularly and even then the algorithms of Instagram or I think in the past groups have used like Facebook or any number of these things the algorithms are only going to show them to like a very specific percent of people on our page so a lot of the work that we have to do is going to be word of mouth they're putting up flyers places and even then those are generally for like a specific event which means that we have to have like a specific thing and a specific time that we have to try and get as many people to come down to or we have to like host a bunch of events at a bunch of different times like do outreach and stuff and if we're running a newspaper I think it makes it a lot easier to get people involved because they can come to any meeting at any time and learn about what they can do to get involved but also learn about how they can support us on a project if they just want to you know put in some work on something so we cover a lot of different issues around town we work with uh I know some of us individually we've worked with migrant justice in the past doing we got a migrant justice sweatshirt right here and we love all the work they do and we help out at protests and we do phone banking and any number of things and we love helping out with them and then generally just supporting different protest movements and unions around town is work we've also done in the past but for the newspaper specifically we want to be like both spreading the word about things that are happening around town but also talking about you know national issues international issues and also like fun creative things because you know you spend long enough time in an activist space specifically on like one or two campaigns you burn out pretty fast and things can be really draining so we've all burned out we've gotten less burnt out but that doesn't really go away so having a space where you can be creative and sort of regenerate yourself a bit has been very nice I was going to say beyond just like the topics of like like sexual assault or like racism sexism, patriarchy on campus part of what we also cover in The Godfly is like any sort of like artistic expression that we think is like meaningful or important which is why we've already included like a lot of poetry a lot of art and such which sometimes people would not have another route to publish with and we can like platform the creations of people in our own community which I think is one of the most important things we can do as just a group of people who publish any media it's fun to put pen to paper also like it helps with archiving it's hard to keep track of what gets put online when it comes to like archiving stuff like special collections at UVM is trying to navigate that but I'm also kind of old school I think we're all kind of old school I do enjoy newspapers and printed versions of things and yeah I guess that's a pretty simple explanation but everything else that Max said also matters also I think some of this sort of comes out of like zine culture which is something that was big when I was growing up and I think still is now and was before I grew up too yeah 90's too people still make and print zines and they're very personal a lot of the time but also I would much rather have a little zine that I could hold and show my friends and make copies of easily rather than like an Instagram slideshow which I would have to pull up on my phone or text to a friend I like a physical copy we also really hard to do on a website or on Instagram is fun little games we try and throw in a word search or a crossword in every single issue I think we've done bingo yes 420 zine special edition mini one page or zine it's more like interactive it's more tactile it's more intimate I think to have something in paper physical and that helps like there used to be a contest that if you found the most typos and they were accurate you'd get a couple pints of ice cream you should do that well back in the day it used to be seconds from Ben and Jerry's because you could go in and buy seconds but we found a couple typos then people have to read yeah look for the typos I'll do that at home so you mentioned like learning about things you know in your classes about social justice and I you know it makes me think about the race and culture class which I think is called something else now what's it called so it could be a number of things because now it's called diversity requirements so race and racism falls within D1 and everything else kind of European stuff and you know the origin of these classes right yes I do let's talk a little bit about that so like going back to successful movements I so the protestors the Waterman Takeover protestors in 88 and 91 talked a lot about existing racism and I was actually watching an old video where they're like sitting on the ground I think this might have been 91 they're sitting on the ground somewhere and talking about I think this is post takeover and they said that this isn't a diversity issue this is an anti-racism issue and I think that's how we should frame it like I don't think I think it's a little messed up to call these requirements as if they like are a checklist as if like diversity needs to be you check off a box and you've achieved diversity Sarah Emma talks a lot about that and the role of diversity or like diversity work in institutions but going back to the movement that caused it or led to these requirements obviously like I think having these processes that do talk about race and racism should be happening and they weren't and I'm glad that they were able to bring that tangible change to campus I think the office of DEI is working or I think has like finalized a new version of diversity requirements on campus and I think they're going to be set in place in a few years but that was also what is now known as the mosaic center on campus I think is also a direct result of the protests that happened I think it was called the center for cultural plurality pluralism for many many years and it is now called the mosaic center and the mosaic center has given me such a safe space on campus like it means so much to me and so much to a lot of my friends and it's honestly like due to those protesters and the activism that happened in 81 and 91 and I don't think people would realize that enough Also I was saying where you and Sam met we met we met at the mosaic kitchen I'm not always there it's actually my least favorite spot for others the kitchen someone introduced us to each other and I was like and that's how Sam got involved with Mutual Aid UVM US so Sam wouldn't be here if not for you if not for the 91 takeover that's great Sam were you going to say something more about that I was going to say actually going back to the idea of the D1 classes as just being something that the university like slapped the word diversity on and went with it it seems like the way that these are taught and the manner in which they're required is pandering heavily to what's very well known like UVM's predominantly incredibly white campus to where they're just kind of giving like their massive white students like a little cop out card of you took a diversity course therefore we've taught you to be anti-racist and they just run with that even though realistically there's no actual action being done there's nothing that is really being done to teach these people to be anti-racist they can just like sit through the class and as long as they take the credits the university assumes that they've unlearned what they've had to unlearn and to add to that I don't think because and I'm in cast so I do have a little more exposure to I guess the arts and social sciences which do tend to be very white but a lot for different colleges these are the only two like social science classes they kind of have to take and they're done and I think my issue with that is that I think we should have these elements exist in every class and not have that be like a separate like special class where students are like yeah I learned about diversity I learned about racism today it sounds like we're getting to a time place where we're gonna it sounds like we could do a number of shows sounds like I could have their own I could have like TV to describe to level criticisms and suggestions and growth opportunities for what's happening at UVM for changes that could be implemented I did want to take a minute to bring up the archival footage that you looked at because you were talking about so I have here and we'll see if we can see it on the screen here I just searched under the term because that was and so I'm wondering if anything begins to look the UVM student takeover UVM arrests and removals oh epic no names for justice sit in at UVM from 2018 which is interesting UVM student takeover three days visiting the office in 1991 are any of these clips and then there are clips that you'll see this UVM minority titles and news clippings from 1988 there's that are there they're in our archives they just haven't been digitized yet so is there one of these that you wanted to take a look at or have or recommend definitely the 88 documentary it's also on YouTube too I don't remember how I discovered it I think I accidentally discovered CCTV because I was like googling all these things and I saw your archive collection and I think that's when I like truly became obsessed and started learning about campus history but that I'm going to bring this up because it's a little meta this is UVM student takeover of Waterman building oh my god this one I showed my friends this it looked so 90's and it's it's in the studio here oh it's in the studio here but when our studio was on the other side of the building let's take a look it's 5.45 and we are on live on channel 17 I am Lauren Glendividian here for the next half hour we are visiting with some of the students who occupied the president's office at the University of Vermont and I'm going to let them introduce themselves and I'm also going to tell our viewers that you can call us at 862-3966 if you have any questions or comments we love your phone calls the phone number is here on our desk since our character generator just died so you're going to have to remember that number 862-3966 and I will repeat it often and there's a siren so why don't we just start by you all introducing yourselves my name is Lauren Glendividian and it was just a shot as well can you talk a little bit about why you occupied the president's office what was the process who your group of people are just a little bit of the background about what happened and why basically we were just a bunch of concerned students for the past couple years this thing that we did was an action that we thought was necessary looking at what the university was doing for people of color on the campus of UVM which was basically nothing for the past when they promised these broad range changes called water agreements which is totally marginalized and they did not do anything really basically for students of color on campus for the past three years except for lie and give them the run around in the ministry process so what was part of the water agreement that was reached three years ago what were some of the conditions some of them were really speak up into the mic all the mic close to you so it's important to note an increase in number of faculty of color and students of color I think it's important to note that these are students that are outreach including to people of color to come to the university these are students that have been in the president's office now for I can't even remember it's like 20 days and they had just all been arrested in a pretty dramatic arrest we've seen the video of that too and they had taken over the students office and you'll learn some of that through this is they've taken over the students office the president's office after probably months and months and for some folks years of different kinds of negotiation to try to actually affect change around a series of points that were pretty agreed upon by the community and the whole event was a learning experience for the entire campus did you learn did you catch some of that when you were reviewing the footage what did you get from reviewing this footage I'm curious I was first of all shook that they were even able to do that I mean we spent I guess a week in the tents and that destroyed us but to spend 20 days I think it was 22 almost I think it got up to 22 what could be wrong in the president's row demanding that they listen to your demands and and I think I learned a lot from that well I learned that UVM hasn't really done a lot since but it's definitely impacted the few people of color that still do exist on campus I think at that time it was 2% of campus and now it's gone up to roughly 11-12% students of color now are constitute 12% of the UVM which is interesting definitely an increase from 2% but I think there's less than 100 black students on campus it still sucks I didn't have a person of color I didn't have a professor of color teach me until last semester and he was the first faculty of color in the political science department I've heard many black students talk to me about how they've never had a black professor teach them in their respective colleges I don't see representation really anywhere like I walk into a room and I immediately notice that like it's just filled with a lot of white circles and white circles that have the privilege to not be affected by the issues on campus related to racism a couple things I've learned from it is that they're willing to publish the names and addresses of student activists Burlington Free Press did that at the time and just the amount of pushback that they had to students and also that nothing really changed in the way that the university handles their response to requests for change I mean they'll still pass the occasional bill and they set up negotiations and they'll ask students for their commentary or for us to plan an entire plan for them to do like they have something called the sustainable campus fund for climate things and we finally do get them to commit to something they'll either weasel out of it and avoid doing it or they will say they'll do it for a year and then roll it back like we see with divestment they committed to divestment it's got to be three years ago now fossil fuel divestment which is different from the South African divestment I think that's finished by now but fossil fuel divestment they committed to doing so got to be three years ago now 2020 summer yeah 2020 summer they signed contracts and agreements and stuff and they were supposed to deliver progress updates and they haven't and they won't respond to request for accountability and frankly I think they know that also another thing I noticed is that this group had pretty well set up like networks of support and a lot of students willing to do occupations and at this point occupations are really intense and the responses from the university have gotten more intense over the years because they've faced these encampments and occupations in the past that now every single year I don't know if it's just me that gets emailed this but I get an email every year that says you're not allowed to build temporary structures on university greens or erect a temporary structure which is like a tent or technically you're not allowed to hammock but people still hammock they don't care about that they care about us yeah because the point is it's something they can refer to to stop people from protesting just quickly on that note in 2018 there was the no-names suggestion movement and we scrolled past there quickly a clip from it when they did a small waterman takeover and some people used megaphones and UVM tried to ruin those people's lives UVM tried as desperately the administration tried desperately and as hard as it could to expel these students to mess up their lives as much as possible and the only reason they didn't they didn't fully do that is because of student pushback I was going to speak to what Max said about university responses and I think that's what that's a major reason why 91 happened is I'm going to quote Sarah Emeth again but documents become a method of institutional performance where the institutions do the documents instead of doing the doing and I think that's what they saw the first president signed the agreement and then left and then nothing ever came of that and then they got a new president and was like nope I'm not doing that and I guess they essentially had to restart the whole process over again and I mean the university loves to make committees to act like they're doing something about an issue but these committees are very reserved you have to apply to them they very much do know the students that speak out openly and are visible about these issues but they would rather have them apply to these positions that shouldn't need any application process these issues affect everyone why are we making these early honorary committees to address something so severe on campus and then the very activists get rejected and it's almost like I've been rejected from committees and it almost like I think it's almost my stupidity for thinking that they're going to change and it's really stupid to actually ever comes from these committees when I think that's interesting the idea that documents become a performance and the documents become the doing rather than the than the actual doing and I think I think as I said we have more to talk about about the actual doing and I welcome you all to come back I wanted to bring that up specifically to show you how these students got invited it was one of the first times I had learned because I was a student at that time these are all folks that I went to school with I was one of the students outside who helped build diversity university and it was one I was like oh here's this place where folks can make their own media so yay for you to grab literally the pen and the mic and make your own media form of the newspaper and talk about the kind of pushback you're getting or the reception or your work to become recognized by the student government but it's been great to hear from you all here today and I really appreciate you taking the time to share it. Thank you so much for having us. And thank you all for watching it's been great to be here together we'll have us all on the set and if you want to see more media like this keep watching town meeting television we are on 1087 Comcast we are on channel 17 and 217 Burlington telecom and you can also watch us on YouTube backslash town meeting TV and if you want to make your own TV please join us the studio is open to you your organization your community thanks and good night