An open letter from @TheOtherPetrels
@TheOtherPetrels is an Instagram account run by anonymous Oglethorpe University community members. Since July 1, 2020, they have shared anonymously submitted accounts by fellow marginalized community members in the form of Instagram posts. Consequently, significant institution-wide changes have been made; harmful members of administration, faculty, and staff have been removed or stepped away from the positions of power they exploited.
@TheOtherPetrels has received a tremendous amount of support from community members who felt heard, as well as a hostile array of messages and interactions. This op-Ed is a public statement written by @TheOtherPetrels to expand on their work and current aims in the movement.
“We may be TheOtherPetrels, but we don’t want your breadcrumbs.”
We would like to extend our utmost gratitude to those who have vocally supported us. We understand these stories are difficult to relive and digest, however, there is an invaluable importance in the ability to share lived experiences. It takes courage to come forward and share your story, and our page would not exist without the courageous people who have decided to bring their experiences to light.
When we say we are TheOtherPetrels, we are not referring solely to those who run the account but rather, “we” means the Oglethorpe University community members who are subject to systemic oppression. We are, specifically, targeted by ableism, white supremacy, cisheteropatriarchy, and rape culture. We want to uplift and are accountable to those who are queer and trans, Black and Indigenous people, people of color, disabled people, and survivors.
We are a collective of past and present community members that have been involved in several sectors of the Oglethorpe experience and have witnessed first-hand the Oglethorpe administration’s failures towards the student body, faculty, and staff. Our movement is a part of the global initiative calling for the abolition of the education industrial complex.
TheOtherPetrels’ movement would simply not exist had it not been for those organizing for Black liberation, the courage of the creators of the following instagram accounts and the labor of countless other community organizers. This movement is directly inspired by current movements for Black liberation, and the creation of @TheOtherPetrels on Instagram was inspired by similar accounts like @blackatemory, @blackatuga, and @panthersforblackfeminism. We would like to take a moment to acknowledge the lives lost in the movement for Black lives and justice.
We want to iterate that the goal of TheOtherPetrels is to disrupt hegemonic systems of oppression and demand more for QTBIPOC, disabled folks, and survivors. We specifically aim to center queer, trans, Black, Indigenous, people of color, disabled people, and survivors of sexual assault. We are bringing to the forefront the performative nature of Oglethorpe’s diversity and inclusion initiatives. If the stories posted on our account outrage you, if you read the stories and have similar experiences, if you carry a story that you have not submitted, or if you are still apprehensive about sharing your story you have the power to loudly critique Oglethorpe. We neither seek personal gain nor want to prop ourselves as the sole voice of representation for students, but rather encourage Oglethorpe to take its own initiatives in meeting student demands and reaching out directly to the student body. We do this by putting pressure on the administration, making it difficult for Oglethorpe to continue ignoring marginalized voices.
This page is a result of the culmination of experiences spanning many years. Oglethorpe community members have long experienced injustices by the institution’s administration, faculty, and staff. We acted after seeing the university’s response in the wake of social and political unrest during the summer of 2020: the town halls and the tactless decision to have an anti-racism activism class taught by Amy Palder, a white professor. This class is not for a white person to teach. She, like all oppressive faculty and staff members, was enabled by the administration, specifically under the direction of Michelle Hall and the tenure of Larry Schall at Oglethorpe University. Palder stepping down from her position does not guarantee safety nor security. Oglethorpe has long fostered a culture of performative diversity and inclusivity which does nothing to address root systemic harm. Oglethorpe University is simply a microcosm of the education industrial complex.
We’re here to give a platform to the stories that attest to this and demand more from those who claim Oglethorpe is a safe space for QTBIPOC, disabled people, and survivors. Individual actors have attempted to make changes and highlight similar instances of harm but the university utilized their power to silence these voices. There have been multiple instances in which even faculty and staff who try to make a substantial systemic change at Oglethorpe have been gaslit, harassed, and even fired. How are we supposed to trust in Oglethorpe making a change internally when they have gone against even their own faculty and staff? Who is not disposable and who is safe?
Furthermore, prominent student representatives have reached out to us to encourage community members to use existing channels to report incidents. We have received 400+ (and counting) submissions that can attest to the fact that the existing channels are corrupt. Additionally, the university has maintained the stance that students should utilize its reporting form to fill out complaints, thus insinuating that the submissions made to TheOtherPetrels will not be viewed as official complaints. This stance centers whiteness and adheres to respectability politics, demanding these voices go through the systems the university controls, otherwise the stories shared on TheOtherPetrels are null and void. This is yet another blatant example of the university’s inaccessibilty to its queer, trans, Black, Indigenous, people of color, disabled, and survivor community members. The reality is that Oglethorpe’s faculty, staff, and administration have followed and viewed our posts, but have yet to reach out to us and ask us what they can do to correct their actions which have caused great harm to community members. Again, we aim to disrupt the systems that do not serve marginalized populations.
It is evident through the submissions made to us that any attempt on the university’s behalf to work with us will be aimed at maintaining the university’s image as a “diverse and inclusive” space. While Niche has awarded Oglethorpe an “A” in diversity, we know that without anti-racist principles, diversity and inclusion are just ways for white hegemony1 to be maintained. Hence, the purpose of our work is not to engage with the administration, but rather to highlight the injustices faced by Oglethorpe community members so that the university is forced to be transparent about the work it does to serve its marginalized community members.
President Nicholas Ladany has yet to directly and explicitly address this movement and credit us. Instead, Oglethorpe has continued to use unpaid student labor to communicate with this account, avoiding reaching out to us directly, thus perpetuating another tactic of white supremacy2. It is disappointing, yet unsurprising, that the university is relying on student representatives and generalized emails to do damage control. It is the job of the administration to act on these issues and communicate those changes to all community members. Instead, Oglethorpe has effectively been stonewalling. Oglethorpe must explicitly acknowledge our account and the concerns being raised and introduce policies that center and prioritize QTBIPOC, disabled people, and survivors.
1 (white) hegemony: the social, cultural, ideological, or economic influence exerted by a dominant group (dominant group being white people).
2 Exemplified by oppressors using individuals who they believe to be peers of the opposition with the intention that it will bring the results the oppressors want.
Furthermore, Oglethorpe must do this by seeking out community and advocacy organizations that center harm reduction for those affected, while being open and transparent about their actions. To emphasize, the current channels do not address issues at the root; rather, they only performatively address issues to save face and thus perpetuate an oppressive system. We cannot be silenced whether at the request of the university’s administration or through their student representatives. The reality is that Oglethorpe is just another institution that views its students as monetizable; like all universities, it is a business and is run as such, with low-income students as pawns.
Are we surprised by all these stories given what we know Oglethorpe truly is under the surface? It is reprehensible that the university does not even mention that Oglethorpe occupies Muscogee/Creek land. While Oglethorpe prides itself on its namesake James Edward Oglethorpe as an “opponent of slavery,” that is not enough. Despite his “position” as being “anti-slavery,” he was a colonizer who occupied stolen land and is credited for “founding” the land. Oglethorpe being a white man benefitting from white supremacy and slavery undeniably informs the university’s neoliberal complacency.
In conclusion, it is absurd that Oglethorpe is trying to position itself as an institution that is on the “right side of history,” when it has always been anything but. This has been an institution that has reinforced the very structures that it claims to stand against by creating an environment that tolerates and perpetuates anti-Blackness, racism, classism, transphobia, ableism, Islamophobia, imperialism, and rape culture. It requires deep cognitive dissonance by the oglethorpe admin to have a “strong commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion” when their actions do not reflect this.
That’s why it is important for these stories to be told, to disrupt hegemony, reclaim our agency, narrate our experiences, and leverage our power to enact change for queer, trans, Black people, Indigenous people, people of color, disabled people, and survivors. We call on all affected members of our community to collectively take action by loudly critiquing Oglethorpe when they do something that merely carries the label of “diverse and inclusive” without any significant structural and systemic impact. Our ultimate goal is for the circumstances that prompted the creation of this account and this work to be nonexistent.
