Day’s Plan to Whitewash Protest Wall Angers Students

A blackened downtown San Diego casts its reflection in a murky bay beside the ghostly depiction of San Diego State University. A large tree spreads its dead branches over the scene, supporting a noose squeezed tight around a book titled, “California Education, ’91.”

The mural was one of the more artistic works painted on a plywood fence surrounding a construction site at San Diego State University. For the past two weeks, students have taken to using the fence as a canvas for protest art and graffiti, in a rise of student activism against proposed budget cuts that would reduce the university’s operations by 10% next fall.

University President Thomas Day, who ordered the cuts in response to a $12.6-billion state deficit, has pledged to paint the entire fence white in preparation for this weekend’s graduation ceremonies. The move is opposed by those who consider the wall an important symbol of the student and faculty movement that rose up against the budget cuts in April.

“I think it’s important for parents on Commencement Day to see this,” said senior Joe Lara, who helped paint the wall. “People put a lot of time into it, and a lot of genuine sincerity and concern.”

The wall went up about two weeks ago when construction crews began demolishing the teaching laboratory building to make way for a student services center, university spokesman George Cole said.

About 450 feet long and 9 feet high, the fence stretches along a busy walkway leading to the “free speech area,” where a series of recent protest rallies and marches took place. Near the mural with the noose, other images espouse protest rhetoric: a masked gunman clutches a fistful of cash marked “tuition,” Calvin and Hobbes read over a paper labeled “Wilson’s Budget,” a tree of knowledge is hacked by an ax labeled “Wilson.”

“This is the most amazing thing I’ve ever seen on this campus,” Merek Findling, a sophomore who helped organize the recent protests said. “The students were united, and expressed themselves in a creative and positive way. Taking it down is like sweeping the problem under the rug.”

But artwork on other areas of the fence was less inspirational. Just off the walkway area, slogans turned to profanity. Much of the spray-painted scrawl had no political point and turned into an open free-for all, including “Kilroy was here.”

Day is planning a campus clean-up which includes picking up trash, trimming back trees and painting the wall white.

“It’s like doing housecleaning before you have guests,” Day said. “I don’t think the wall as it is right now looks very clean institutionally.”

Day envisioned a white wall for the commencement from the beginning: When he included in the construction contract a request to paint the wall white at different phases of the project months ago.

At first, Day permitted the murals. But, along with them came the angry, sometimes crude slogans.

“I respect the students’ right to make political statements,” he said. “But I don’t think we should have political protests at commencement. We should not concentrate on the protest of the day, but on the commencement of the day. I think the students deserve that.”

Graduate student Kjersti Reed found out the wall would be covered when she ran into Day speaking to a group of protesters outside his office last Wednesday.

“I heard him say he was going to paint over the wall,” she said, “and that just infuriated me. It’s so repressive. He said he was not in favor of the budget cuts. Why would he remove the very evidence of what the students feel about it? I think it’s enlivened this campus immensely and contributed to an aura of political awareness.”

Walking briskly to be on time for a final exam, Ashley Novak discussed with a friend where she should place her own protest slogan. She was surprised to learn the wall was to be painted over, but added that her friends would “probably just paint over it again right after they were finished.”