[A student group called No Red Tape has held protests, including one in which it projected the words “Columbia protects rapists” on the facade of a school library, and a number of students on Tuesday put red tape on their baby-blue mortarboards to show their support. In February, the university instituted a sexual respect education requirement, which obliges students in all schools to attend workshops or complete art projects on the theme of sexual respect.]
By Kate Taylor
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Emma
Sulkowicz, center, with her mattress at Class Day, a graduation
event
for seniors at Columbia College on Tuesday. Ms. Sulkowicz
carried
the mattress around campus with her this year to protest
the
university's handling of her sexual assault complaint.
|
Aided by four friends, and to the cheers of
some of her classmates, the student who protested Columbia
University’s handling of her sexual assault complaint by carrying a mattress around campus all year hoisted it for the last time on Tuesday
as she crossed the stage at a graduation ceremony.
Until seconds before the student, Emma
Sulkowicz, walked onstage, Columbia officials had asked her to leave the
mattress behind. President Lee C. Bollinger turned away as she crossed in front
of him, failing to shake her hand, as he did with the other graduates.
Ms. Sulkowicz’s graduation, and the end of her
protest, brought to a close a tumultuous year, in which Columbia became a focus
of the movement to change how universities address sexual assault.
A student group called No Red Tape has held
protests, including one in which it projected the words “Columbia protects rapists” on the facade of a
school library, and a number of students on Tuesday put red tape on their
baby-blue mortarboards to show their support. In February, the university
instituted a sexual respect education requirement, which
obliges students in all schools to attend workshops or complete art projects on
the theme of sexual respect.
As a result of her protest, which is also her
senior art thesis, Ms. Sulkowicz herself has become the face of a national
movement to raise awareness about sexual assault.
She attended the State of the Union address this year as
the guest of Senator Kirsten E. Gillibrand, Democrat of New York, who is
pushing a bill that would require every college to survey its students about
their experience with sexual violence, create a uniform disciplinary process
for accusations of assault and give law enforcement agencies a greater role.
Minutes before Ms. Sulkowicz walked across the
stage, Paul Nungesser, the student she has accused of
rape, did so as well, to little response from the crowd.
Mr. Nungesser, who was cleared by the university
and has maintained that their sexual encounter was consensual, filed a federal discrimination suitlast month
against the school, Mr. Bollinger and the professor who approved Ms.
Sulkowicz’s thesis project, saying he has been the victim of a harassment
campaign.
One of the rules Ms. Sulkowicz set for her
project was that she would carry the mattress whenever she was on campus until
Mr. Nungesser was no longer there.
The ceremony on Tuesday was on Class Day for
seniors at Columbia College. The universitywide commencement is Wednesday, but
Ms. Sulkowicz said on Tuesday that she was done with her project.
As for what will become of the mattress, which
she bought online, she said she would hang onto it.
“If some sort of museum wants to buy it, then
I’m open to that,” she said, “but I’m not going to just throw it away.”
Mr. Nungesser, who walked briskly away from
campus immediately after the ceremony, declined to comment.
The university had actively discouraged Ms.
Sulkowicz from carrying the mattress. In an email sent to students on Monday,
the university asked students not to bring “large objects which could interfere
with the proceedings or create discomfort to others in close, crowded spaces
shared by thousands of people” into the ceremonial area.
Ms. Sulkowicz said that as students were lined
up before the ceremony in Alfred Lerner Hall, a woman approached her and asked
her to put the mattress in a room in the hall for the duration of the ceremony.
Ms. Sulkowicz, who had stated she would not walk in the ceremony if she could
not carry the mattress, refused.
Later, as Ms. Sulkowicz and her friends
approached the stage, the woman reappeared and again asked her not to take it
onstage, saying it would “block the flow of traffic.”
Even the dean who was reading out the names
seemed to get nervous, stumbling over hers.
As Ms. Sulkowicz and her friends ascended the
stage, Mr. Bollinger, who had been shaking the students’ hands, turned his back
and leaned down as though to pick something up from his seat. Ms. Sulkowicz
leaned over the mattress, trying to catch his eye, then straightened up and
kept walking, shrugging with her free hand.
“I even tried to smile at him or look him in
the eye, and he completely turned away,” she said later. “So that was
surprising, because I thought he was supposed to shake all of our hands.”
A spokeswoman for the university, Victoria
Benitez, said that the mattress had been between Ms. Sulkowicz and Mr.
Bollinger and that no snub was intended.
However, the keynote speaker, Mayor Eric
Garcetti of Los Angeles, alluded approvingly to Ms. Sulkowicz’s protest.
Applauding student activism at Columbia, he told the students: “You felt
outside of society, sufficiently determined to challenge hierarchy that you
took risks. You held contrary opinions, held die-ins and sit-ins and carried
mattresses. Most importantly, you have learned to empathize, to look out for
others and to listen.”
