What if I told you that Kyle Rittenhouse crossed state lines with an illegal firearm and then, unprovoked, murdered two Black Lives Matter protestors and injured a third? 

I would be lying. 

On August 25, 2020, he offered low-grade medical help at a Black Lives Matter protest-turned-chaotic demonstration and ended up shooting three men, killing two. This past November, he was acquitted of all charges. 

Following the ruling, an op-ed in The Wellesley News falsely claimed that Rittenhouse “pretended to be a medic” and “was armed with an illegally procured military-style rifle.” The article represents popular misunderstandings that make Rittenhouse out to be a white supremacist getting away with murder. The truth is much more nuanced.

Kyle Rittenhouse was no stranger to Kenosha, Wisconsin, and he didn’t come from out of town to attend the demonstration. He worked in the next town over, and much of his family — including his father and grandmother — lived in Kenosha. He testified that he went to his job on August 24 and spent the night in Kenosha with a friend whose stepdad stored his gun. He owned the weapon legally, and it didn’t cross state lines. 

Rittenhouse was a fire/EMT cadet in his hometown of Antioch, Illinois. On August 25, 2020 he didn’t cross state lines with an AR-15 and the intent to kill. Rather, he went to downtown Kenosha that morning to walk around and clean graffiti off a school. He testified that his first-aid kit, which he brought with him when he worked as a lifeguard, was in the back of his car. When a chemical bomb went off, he said, he helped flush a man’s eyes. He also wrapped a woman’s ankle. 

The first man Rittenhouse shot, Joseph Rosenbaum, threatened to kill him twice. According to Rittenhouse’s testimony, he and Ryan Balch, who he’d met that day, “were asking people if they needed medical help.” Balch saw Rosenbaum trying to start a fire and asked him not to, he said in court. Then, according to Rittenhouse, Rosenbaum “screamed, sorry for my language, he screamed, ‘If I catch any of you fuckers alone, I’m going to fucking kill you.’” 

According to witness testimony, Rosenbaum lunged at Rittenhouse and tried to grab his gun. Rittenhouse shot him. 

The Wellesley News editors asked me to “justify [my] reasoning for using these testimonies as [my] primary source.” They published an op-ed about Rittenhouse with false information, then demanded that I explain why I’m using sworn, uncontested court testimony. 

If the public wants to judge the jury for acquitting Rittenhouse, they ought to understand the evidence that was presented. Much of that was testimony. None of the testimony I cite was disputed in court. 

Major newspapers have cited Rittenhouse’s testimony. The Washington Post corrected an article based on it. Another Post article explained key parts of what Rittenhouse said in court. The New York Times cited testimony in their summary of the case. Why? Because journalists use testimony to tell the full story of a court case. 

Okay, back to the trial: 

Rosenbaum was not a Black Lives Matter protester. He was filmed saying the n-word and seen lighting a dumpster on fire — hardly the racial justice advocate that Rittenhouse’s victims have been made out to be. Rosenbaum had been released from a psychiatric hospital that day and couldn’t pick up his medication because the pharmacy had been boarded up in the chaos.

Soon after, Anthony Huber hit Rittenhouse on the head with a skateboard. Rittenhouse’s defense attorney claimed that Huber then reached for Rittenhouse’s gun. In response, Rittenhouse shot Huber, killing him.

Paramedic Gaige Grosskreutz, who volunteered as a medic and a legal observer, followed the sound of gunshots. He testified that he wanted to stop Rittenhouse from shooting anyone else. To do this, he walked up to Rittenhouse and pointed a gun at him. Rittenhouse shot Grosskreutz in the arm. He survived. At Rittenhouse’s trial, a defense lawyer asked Grosskreutz, “It wasn’t until you pointed your gun at him — advanced on him with your gun, now your hands down, pointed at him — that he fired, right?” and Grosskreutz answered, “Correct.” 

Anthony Huber appears to have been a racial justice protestor — he went to Kenosha that night because he knew Jacob Blake, the Black man whose shooting by police earlier that week sparked protests. Grosskreutz was a volunteer medic. Both did what we hope ordinary people will do in violent situations: they stood up to a person they saw as a threat. 

But Rittenhouse fired his first shots because Rosenbaum threatened him and reached for his gun. By attacking Rittenhouse, in Huber’s case, or raising a gun at him, as Grosskreutz did, they put him in further danger, validating his self-defense claim. 

It’s disappointing to see figures I respect get this story so wrong. The day after the shootings, Congresswoman Ayanna Pressley tweeted, “A 17 year old white supremacist domestic terrorist drove across state lines, armed with an AR 15. He shot and killed 2 people who had assembled to affirm the value, dignity, and worth of Black lives. Fix your damn headlines.”

Rittenhouse did not cross state lines with an AR-15. He supported Trump, but he had no connection to any white supremacist groups. One of the people he killed had been threatening him and saying the n-word — Rosenbaum was hardly there to “affirm the value, dignity, and worth of Black lives.” 

After Rittenhouse was acquitted this past November, journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones tweeted, “In this country, you can even kill white people and get away with it if those white people are fighting for Black lives. This is the legacy of 1619.” 

Rittenhouse didn’t shoot people for fighting for Black lives. He shot them because they threatened him, threatened to take his gun — which they could’ve used to kill him — and pointed a gun at him. 

Rittenhouse’s perfectly legal gun is what put him, and others, in danger. Both men he killed threatened him by reaching for it. Ideally, he wouldn’t have brought a firearm to the demonstrations on August 25, 2020. Neither would’ve Grosskreutz. Rosenbaum and Huber would still be alive, and Grosskreutz would’ve been spared the trauma. Nobody should’ve been shot. 

But the popular narrative — that the criminal justice system supported a murderer who went to Kenosha to shoot down racial justice protestors — is just wrong. 

Vanessa Delarca ʼ22 let a friend borrow her bike during the weekend of Sept.18. The friend left it unlocked at a bike rack outside Pomeroy Hall, and when Delarca walked by the area on the following Monday, she noticed it was gone. 

“When I realized it was missing, I was very upset, so I walked around campus to every bike rack,” she said. “It was at none of the bike racks. That was pretty upsetting.” 

She posted a picture of her bike — a blue Trek hardtail mountain bike with a yellow bell — on Wellesley College’s Lost and Found Facebook group. Two other students commented that their bikes had been stolen recently, too. 

Ella Warburg ʼ22 left her bike at Nehoiden Golf Course on Sept. 11 while she traveled to a golf tournament in Maine. It was unlocked. 

“There are no bike racks at the golf course,” she said, but she didn’t expect it to go missing: “It doesn’t look like a nice bike. I don’t think anyone would steal it for parts or to resell it; it doesn’t look like it has a lot of value.”

Warburg reported her bike stolen to Campus Police that day. 

“Sgt. Brown helped me, but I have called pretty much every day since then, and no one has ever returned any of my calls,” she said.  

Regina Gallardo ʼ23 locked her bike to a rack outside Claflin Hall when she left campus this spring. She hasn’t seen it — or the cable lock she had threaded through the frame — since then. She left her bike on campus from March to September of last year, so she thought her bike would be safe, she said. She’d borrowed the bike — black and yellow, with a flat tire — from her aunt. 

“Because it’s not mine, I’m actually pretty freaked out,” she said. 

Gallardo talked to Campus Police, and an officer looked for her bike in the basement of Dower Hall, where stray bikes are sometimes put in storage. Hers was not there. She planned to fill out a police report the next Monday.

According to an email from Acting Chief of Police Philip N. Di Blasi, when a student contacts Campus Police to report their bike stolen, an “officer from Campus Safety will meet with the person whose bike was taken and gather a description of the bike, its value, when the [sic] last used it, and where they last left it,” and will then drive around campus looking for it. 

“In the case of finding the bike elsewhere on campus, it is most often somebody who used it to get from one point to another,” Di Blasi wrote. 

Di Blasi wrote that only two bikes have been reported stolen since August of last year: on Sept. 7, 2020, and Sept. 11, 2021 — Warburg’s. But The News knows of at least one other student who told Campus Police that her bike was stolen last fall, and Di Blasi has no record of it. He said he expects officers to file a report when a student says their bike has been stolen; the student shouldn’t have to specifically request that a report be filed. 

Delarca has not reported her bike missing yet but plans to do so. 

“I’ve never had anything stolen before in my town,” she said. “Maybe I shouldn’t leave my stuff sitting in Pendleton on the desk, you know.” 

But she doubts that a fellow student took her bike, so she thinks her school supplies in a swipe-access building are probably safe. 

Warburg has been disappointed in Campus Police’s handling of her situation. 

“I don’t want there to be Campus Police, but if they do have to be here and they are here, why aren’t they helping find stolen bikes? It’s a very small thing that does not require weapons. If they’re not doing this, then what are they doing?” she said. 

Combined with the campus-wide email notification that a man had approached and yelled at a student on campus on Sept. 20, the theft of her bike has made Gallardo feel unsafe on campus. 

“You think that you’re in the Wellesley bubble, that you’re gonna be safe, but in reality, bubbles get popped really easily, and nothing is a bubble in the real world,” she said.

There are currently no plans to install security cameras near the bike racks, wrote Di Blasi in an email. 

“I do not see the downside to having cameras trained on bike racks, but I also recognize the need for community involvement and conversation when it comes to installing any kind of surveillance on campus,” he wrote. 

As for Warburg, she wants her bike back. 

“My bike was my only form of transportation,” she said. “I love it very dearly because I fixed it up and it’s mine.” 

Delarca is most upset about losing her bell, which has sentimental value: “I would like my lemon bell back,” she said. “That’s the thing that I care about. My cousin helped me pick it out, and they’re very special to me.” 

Kari Gottfried ʼ23 came to Wellesley thinking she would major in political science and minor in religion. During her first year, she took — and loved — multiple political science classes. Then she decided she wanted to be a minister. 

“This summer I was looking at classes to take, and all the religion classes sounded really cool, and none of the poli sci classes sounded cool,” Gottfried said. A new thought occurred to her: “What if I didn’t major in political science and just majored in religion?” 

She mulled it over throughout the summer and fall. When it came time to register for spring semester courses, the same thought arose. Political science classes did not look interesting anymore but those in the religion department did. That sealed the deal; Gottfried decided to be a religion major. 

Jacqueline Galison ʼ23 planned to major in international relations during her first semester, but after taking one look at the course load, she decided it was “absolutely” not what she wanted to study. 

Instead, she took musical theater with English Professor Larry Rosenwald. After enjoying the class and doing well on the assignments, she asked if he thought it would be a viable major for her. 

“He said someone of my abilities would be absolutely welcome in the department,” Galison said.  “Ever since, I’ve been taking [English] courses.” 

Kaitlyn Wang ʼ23 came to Wellesley expecting to double major in English and biology. Her first semester, she took a first-year seminar called Creating Memory. Psychology Professor Margaret Keane gave a guest lecture about the neuroscience of memory. 

Wang then took a neuroscience course her sophomore fall, and shortly after, decided to pursue it as a major. She likes how it “connects with so many different parts” of the human experience, “like memory, language, mental illness, identity consciousness,” as well as cellular and molecular topics.

As for her initial plan, Wang said, “Neuroscience kind of incorporated both of those interests.”

The major declaration form was a little confusing, said Gottfried, but she eventually figured it out. It asks students to list courses they have taken for each distribution requirement and select which courses they plan to take to fulfill their major. 

“It was nice to have that reflection,” Gottfried said. 

Galison put off officially declaring her major until right before the spring semester began, as she worried that she would get turned down by a potential advisor. When she worked up the nerve to ask, however, she got a “yes, absolutely,” and filled out the form. According to Galison, the hardest part of declaring a major is coming up with a plan for the rest of one’s time at Wellesley. 

“Finding your passion, I think, is the easiest part,” Galison said, noting that there was a lot of uncertainty regarding choosing the classes one could get into. 

Wang was an avid reader in high school. At Wellesley, she discovered that women’s & gender studies “examines some of the social issues” that she most enjoyed reading about. “English will always be my first love,” Wang said, but she has decided to major in neuroscience and minor in women’s & gender studies. 

Gottfried spoke highly of the small religion department. Her major advisor is going on sabbatical next year, but she is not worried about filling the spot. 

“I have so many professors that I know have my back and are willing to talk with me,” Gottfried  said. 

Practicality was on Galison’s mind as she made her decision. Initially, she worried she would not get a job if she majored in English due to the stereotypes of the major. 

“Pursuing dreams isn’t impractical,” she said, adding that Professor Rosenwald and others assured her. “It’s a matter of finding the practicality within something I’ve always aspired to do.”

Passion also led her to Italian studies, which she is planning to declare as a minor as soon as she figures out her plan for the next two years. 

“It’s always so exciting when a professor is so encouraging and gets you so devoted to the course load that you want to make memes in your spare time,” Galison said.  

Wang declared her major in January. For other students who are still deciding, she recommends reaching out to fellow students and professors in potential major departments. Or those people might reach out to you first. Last spring, the student next to her in yoga class was “very enthusiastic about neuro.” That encouragement stuck with her, and it was part of why she decided to try a neuroscience course. The enthusiastic yoga classmate ended up being a supplemental instruction leader. 

“Picking a major is something that was scary to me for a long while,” said Galison. “I didn’t need to feel anxiety about it.” 

Galison encourages students to keep taking classes in new areas that look interesting. “I’m a little under halfway through my time at Wellesley, and I’m still exploring things I love,” she said. 

Gottfried offered similar advice.

“Don’t feel pressured to major in something you want because you think will look good,” she said.

She’s taking six religion courses this year just because she wants to.

“I’m gonna more or less double major in religion,” she said.

Rather than studying what you think you have to study “take classes that spark joy.” Gottfried’s experience came full-circle when she declared her major on Oct. 31, 2020. 

“I was looking back at my photos from two years ago, from Oct. 31, 2018, and there’s a photo of me hitting the submit button on my Wellesley ED I application,” she said. 

One year later, students remember the day well. 

Jasper Saco ʼ22 was eating lunch with friends when they read the announcement. Their first reactions were confusion and disbelief. All around them, other students began to cry.

 “Not comprehending what was happening was the general atmosphere of Bates dining hall that day,” Saco said. 

A scramble to pack up and say goodbyes unfolded over the next five days. 

Anna Hedinger ʼ23 had a hard time seeing her friends off, as they all left at different times. Because her flight was on the earlier end, she had to pack quickly. 

“I regret not saying goodbye to, like, literally everyone I knew,” Hedinger said. “It was just who I happened to see in the hallway.” 

Joy Li ʼ23 planned to spend the spring on campus and return to China when the pandemic-induced travel rush died down. But she found herself packing just as frantically as her roommate, who was going home, in preparation to move to a different dorm. Friends gave her food they could not take with them. She went treasure-hunting through various residential halls’ sustainability bins and responded to every call for help in the crew team group chat. 

“I helped so many people pack and move out,” she said. 

In the hours leading down to the mandatory evacuation date, Saco helped a friend pack, then went to a party on Sev Green. It started with a few students playing Mamma Mia and Latin music on speakers, and as it grew, the crowd migrated down to Green Beach. 

“I think everyone was just really letting loose,” Saco remembered. 

Despite the pandemic that was taking hold underfoot, students did their best to have fun in their last few moments on campus. Many thought things would be back to normal by the summer. 

“That hope that we had that day, I hold on to a lot,” Saco said. 

Sunny weather brought many students outside. Over the last few days before most students left, Li spent much of her time outside on the grass with friends. When the sun went down, students went inside to get as much time together as they could. Another party in Claflin Hall drew Li and much of the crew team, and it turned into a mass of students crying and hugging. 

“So many fluids,” Li said. “That was not very safe at all.” 

Li’s mom, who lived in Shanghai, warned her in February not to go into Boston or gather closely with friends. Li admitted that she “didn’t take her seriously at first,” taking the bus to the HMart in Cambridge to get food for a friend’s birthday. But once Harvard shut down on Mar. 10, she saw Wellesley’s closure as inevitable.

“I think I just kind of watched it follow me,” Li said. 

When she left Shanghai in January, the coronavirus was already spreading quickly in China. She heard rumors that a man infected with COVID-19 had flown the same route shortly after. Friends from high school had to quarantine upon their return to university in Hong Kong, which made the situation sink in. Though she was not as careful as her mom wanted her to be, Li knew it was coming. 

Others were more surprised. 

“It was just really sudden,” said Hedinger. 

She had been focused on whether or not the crew team would take their annual spring break trip to Clemson. And then the trip was canceled, along with the rest of the semester, and she had to pack a bag and leave.

Many students did not fully grasp the gravity of the pandemic. If they had known in March how long it would last, Saco would have hugged their friends more before leaving. 

“I’ve really missed that physical touch over the lockdown,” Saco said. 

“I wish I’d known it would last so long,” Hedinger said. “I didn’t understand the scope or the science of it.” 

Hedinger has not been at Wellesley since last March. She spent the summer working in Alaska, studied abroad in Italy in the fall and joined her dad in Germany for the spring semester. 

“It’s kind of just been a year of, like, being isolated from people I kind of got closer to,” she reflected. 

Li spent the remainder of the Spring 2020 semester in her room in Cazenove Hall, lived with her aunt over the summer and has been back on campus since August. Though vaccines are rolling out, her life does not seem to have changed.

 “A year later, I’m still in Caz,” Li said, “and I still have to wear a mask to go get food from the dining hall.” 

In February, Nigina Ortikova ʼ22 turned to the Wellesley Class of 2022 Facebook group for help. In the comments, she explained her confusion: “Turbo Tax is considering my Wellesley scholarship as an income and generating [an] insane amount of due payment.” Other students commented with similar concerns.

According to the IRS website, higher education scholarships and grants are non-taxable if they pay for tuition, fees and required supplies. Funds for non-qualified expenses, like room and board, are taxable. This means that the most economically disadvantaged college students, who receive the most financial aid, are liable to pay taxes on tens of thousands of dollars that never go through our hands.

Room and board for the 2020-2021 academic year total $17,772. But since first-year students must live on campus, and residential students are required to use the meal plan, can scholarships covering those expenses be taxed?

“I wish Wellesley could have some sort of tax filing workshop with an accountant present to help guide us as we file our taxes,” wrote Marie Aaronian DS ʼ22.

“No one should pay $300 for lawyers or accountants to do their taxes as a student,” wrote Ortikova.

I asked Kari DiFonzo, the director of Student Financial Services, what services were in place to help students with complicated tax situations. “Unfortunately, Student Financial Services is not able to offer tax advice and we do not currently have any tax professionals to connect students with. I often encourage students to reach out to their local H&R Block or Jackson Hewitt if they do not already have a relationship with a tax preparer,” she said via email.

Full-scholarship students do not have tax professionals.

Aaronian has consulted a tax professional in the past but cannot afford it anymore. “I’m an independent student and with the demands of Wellesley courses, I have to cut back my working hours during the semester,” she said. “After my bills are paid, I don’t typically have extra money hanging around to hire a professional.”

Many of us have tax-related questions that cannot be answered with a quick Google search.

“What type of school supplies, if any, should be itemized and claimed (e.g., books, technology supplies, internet plans, gas receipts if commuting, etc.), and where should they be reported on our taxes? In case of an audit, should we hang onto receipts, and for how long?” said Aaronian.

As for me, I want to know whether required first-year room and board and the meal plan can be considered qualified expenses. After all, at Wellesley, they are required expenses.

If Wellesley wants to support low-income students, it can contract a tax professional to work with students on financial aid. It can explore whether requiring students on financial aid to live on campus all four years would make room and board non-taxable. It can get together a group of alumnae in the tax field to answer questions.

But instead, Wellesley tells its poorest students to contact a tax professional.

I’m talking about assigned bathroom fixtures. 

In July, I noticed an unusual answer to one of the Housing Selection FAQs: “Students will be assigned to specific bathroom fixtures, including one toilet, sink and shower.” This was new. The website explains that fixtures are assigned “in order to achieve appropriate ratios and social distancing.” 

Ease of contact tracing seems to be another reason behind assigning bathrooms. A Feb. 12 email from the Office of Residential Life and Housing stated that “members of each residential block are considered close contacts due to sharing bathroom fixtures.” This bypasses the CDC’s current definition of a close contact: “someone who was within 6 feet of an infected person for a cumulative total of 15 minutes or more over a 24-hour period.” 

I’m hardly ever in my bathroom at the same time as someone else. My mask-free time (almost always alone) in my assigned bathroom, from showering and brushing my teeth, does not even add up to 15 minutes over 24 hours. (I take short showers.) So why does sharing bathroom fixtures automatically make blockmates close contacts? 

My bathroom is assigned to my block and half of another. The unlucky floormates from the other block have to go up three stairs and through two doors every time they have to pee. Our bathroom’s one shower is used by members of two blocks, so you cannot even pretend that assigned fixtures keep us unmasked only within our blocks. Despite our shared bathroom — including the shower — those hallmates are not considered close contacts. (Unless they are, in which case the email from res life is misleading.) 

Maybe it has to do with high-touch surfaces, like faucets and flush levers. But over a year into the pandemic, much of the evidence suggests that the coronavirus does not tend to travel this way. 

The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) states on its website that “transmission of novel coronavirus to persons from surfaces contaminated with the virus has not been documented.” Scientists like Emanuel Goldberg, a microbiology professor, say that “surface transmission of COVID-19 is not justified at all by the science.” 

And yet Wellesley assigned us toilets, sinks and showers.

Adding to the ridiculousness of this rule is that we share bathrooms in every non-residential building on campus. Lulu? Shared bathrooms. The Science Center, the mods, Pendleton? Shared bathrooms. If they truly posed a risk, these communal bathrooms would be closed, or at least monitored with a sign-in system for contact tracing. 

Being bound to a specific toilet or shower is aggravating. A few times last fall, I returned to my room from practice with about twenty minutes until the start of class — which is plenty of time for me to shower and pack my bag — to find a hallmate just beginning a twenty-minute shower. I either have to ask her to get out, break the rule and use a different shower or show up late to class. 

Wellesley needs to stop pretending that assigned toilets do anything to prevent the spread of COVID-19. Students aren’t hanging out with others on the toilet. Coronavirus doesn’t travel through touch. The approach is not even consistent with communal bathrooms in academic buildings. Assigned bathrooms don’t protect us. They just force us into situations of not having time to shower or putting off our business until we’re uncomfortable when custodians are cleaning our assigned stalls. 

As administrators consider lifting certain regulations this spring, they should do away with assigned bathroom fixtures. Assigned bathrooms have no basis in preventing the spread of coronavirus, and they put students in both physically and socially uncomfortable situations. Students should have the freedom to use the toilet and shower wherever and whenever it is convenient. 

“Is this gonna be how it is the entire time?”

Shelby Deibler ʼ24 chose Wellesley for the close community and strong relationships with professors the school promised. She pictured hanging out in her room with her door open and getting to know her new environment through a whole week of orientation. When Wellesley released its COVID-19 fall reopening plan, she looked forward to food truck festivals and movie nights, ideas floated by the Office of Residential Life during summer webinars. She registered for three in-person classes, which she expected to be more engaging than her one course online. 

When Deibler arrived, however, dorm room doors mostly stayed closed, and food trucks were nowhere to be found. Movie nights did begin in October, but by then the evenings were cold. 

Deibler matched with her blockmates on the StarRez housing portal, and they moved into the third floor of Stone-Davis. The block turned out to be more of a social institution than a merely residential one, and she found that due to the pandemic, dorm life was heavily restricted. For one thing, blockmates were not allowed in each other’s rooms until late October, and common spaces were less inviting with everyone masked and distanced. When rules changed and students were allowed one blockmate in their rooms, “it [still] felt like we were breaking a rule,” said Deibler. And her block of six could not find a dining hall table large enough for all of them. 

“You had to be creative with how you were meeting other people,” Deibler said. 

To socialize despite limited in-person events and restrictions on eating with others, Deibler reached out to some classmates and joined the novice crew team. 

“I felt community more in the in-person, small gatherings, but due to the block rules and other regulations, it was difficult to meet new people and establish bonds as a group,” Deibler said. 

Bryn Flanigan ʼ24 imagined even tighter COVID-19 restrictions when she arrived on campus, so she was happy to spend time hanging out with her block and bonding over frequent shared meals.

“I was expecting to spend a lot more time in my room,” she said. 

She knew that she would have a relationship with her block, but she didn’t expect that her blockmates would become her closest friends, which they did. 

“We ate almost every single meal together, except for breakfast,” Flanigan said of her blockmates. “We studied together and hung out on the weekends.” 

Another First-year, Ashley**, began college remotely. She was assigned an Orientation Mentor like the rest of the First-years, but she was the only remote student in her group and felt like her OM “forgot they had a remote mentee.” 

Social media connected Ashley with other First-years, who chatted and supported each other. For many, the first year of college is already a hard time to make friends; studying remotely, on top of that, made her feel disconnected from campus. 

Programming got off to a slower start than Flanigan had imagined, but “things started to really improve by the end,” she said—there were more events, and the food got better. She didn’t mind the lack of events at the start of the semester, since she had fun exploring campus, finding new study spots, and hanging out with friends.   

Remote classes turned out to work better for Deibler than in-person. She was excited to go back to the three-dimensional classroom, but found that “it kind of became a chore to go to them” since she was “not even going to get the full experience.” Group work was impossible with physical distancing requirements, and classes sometimes met over Zoom for discussions. Deibler appreciated the consistency of her remote course, but she found that it was “hard to have discussions” over Zoom. 

Ashley chose Wellesley for its location outside Boston, and to study physics without having “to fight for opportunities and air time” in a male-dominated environment. 

Study physics she did. Her first semester, she dove right into two physics courses and calculus. Having taken a gap year, Ashley was new to virtual school. It turned out to be more different from in-person learning than she had imagined. 

“It’s so much more tiring than literally having five different commitments in a day, all day,” she said, contrasting her first semester of college with her high school experiences. 

There is no mingling after class when you are meeting on Zoom. Being away from classmates made it challenging to find a partner for problem sets; when Ashley eventually did, the work went by much faster.  

Flanigan took four in-person courses in the fall, which included classroom time and asynchronous instruction. 

“It was really nice to be able to walk to a classroom, sit in it, and engage with people in-person,” Flanigan said. 

Professors were surprisingly flexible and accommodating, said Deibler. However, she was disappointed by the lack of close relationships with faculty.

“The term system made it very difficult to form strong relationships with professors because we were only with them for less than seven weeks,” Deibler said.

Ashley also found the term system taxing. She remembered being stressed to the point of tears during calculus, a subject she loved. Weekly quizzes in one class were unproductive, but since she was new to college, new to a more traditional way of schooling, and new to remote learning, she did not know if she could advocate to change the assessment. 

Next year, when Ashley hopes to be on campus, she will be adjusting to Wellesley for the first time. But she will not be treated like a First-year. And without knowing what life at Wellesley was like pre-pandemic, she does not know how her experience this semester will relate to that of future ones. 

“Is this gonna be how it is the entire time?” Ashley said. 

Flanigan is looking forward to a post-pandemic college experience, when she’ll be able to take the bus to Boston and socialize more. But she was pleasantly surprised with how much she connected with other students. 

“The pandemic made me glad to have picked Wellesley,” said Flanigan. “I felt lucky that the profile of the school allowed us to adjust and come back.”

**=anonymous interviewee 

Victoria Cottrell ’22 organized the meeting. It “arose out of a long chain of emails I had been sending to ADR, Housing, and [Dean of Students Sheilah] Horton trying to get answers about my prospects for food on campus in the spring, given the fact that I chose to leave one week into the semester partly because I was so sick,” Cottrell said. Dean Horton proposed a meeting after being CC’ed on Cottrell’s emails with the various departments, and Cottrell invited a group of students with allergies and celiac disease. 

Students with severe allergies and celiac disease have long struggled to eat on the Wellesley campus, where nearly every student is required to be on the meal plan. Even when there are options available for these students, they are labeled gluten-sensitive or nut-sensitive rather than -free. (Allergen-sensitive means that a dish is not made with that ingredient, but it does not guarantee the absence of cross-contamination.) Self-serve stations, including salad and sandwich bars during non-COVID times, are off-limits for many students because of the risk of cross-contamination: others may use the same serving utensil for an allergen and then for a non-allergen, which poses risks for their peers with allergies. Tower has a Clarity station, which serves a meat and vegetarian dish made without the top eight allergens and wheat. But those two options per lunch and dinner are “severely lacking,” said a senior with celiac disease.  

Students with food restrictions must often ask for clarification on a food’s ingredients. Earlier this semester, a First-year student asked a dining hall employee whether an item contained gluten, and the employee responded by asking what gluten was, she told the News.  

“That casts a lot of doubt on whether or not I want to eat that,” she said. “I don’t like holding up the line to ask.” 

Food labels are often incorrect. Students shared instances of gluten-containing ingredients being marked gluten-sensitive, or allergens being left off the labels altogether. 

Even when dining exclusively in the Bates Gluten Sensitive Room, Cora Barrett ’23 reported having gotten sick from gluten twice last academic year. In one instance, Wellesley Fresh purchased vegetarian sausages from a different supplier than they had previously used and neglected to check the new label, explained Barrett. The other time she became ill, Barrett ate sausages which contained cracked wheat. She reported this to the manager, the director of operations and the nutritionist, and was told that there was only a “minimal amount” of cracked wheat. Even undetectable amounts of gluten can sicken someone with celiac. 

Existing issues have been compounded by Wellesley’s measures to prevent the spread of COVID-19. Students were initially forbidden from using dorm kitchens this semester due to concerns about high-touch surfaces, according to a college-wide email from Dean Horton on Aug. 17. Those who relied on cooking for themselves were left with a sink and a microwave. While dorm kitchens opened near the end of the semester for two hours a week of recreational cooking, this makes it look like “stress baking” is being prioritized over the food security of those with dietary restrictions, said a senior with celiac. On top of that, the Gluten Sensitive Room in Bates was closed for term one and a month of term two. 

Some students have expressed a desire to get off the mandatory meal plan and take charge of their own meals, but others expect the meal plan to provide for their needs.

“I don’t have time to cook for myself,” said Cottrell. To feed students with restricted diets, she proposed making one of the dining halls allergen- and gluten-free, not just allergen- or gluten-sensitive. Other institutions have done this. Vanderbilt University has a dining hall certified free of the top eight allergens; Cornell University has a certified gluten-free dining hall. 

An anonymous senior with celiac agreed: “I now task admin with taking responsibility for the health and safety of their students. The first step to doing this is making a commitment to providing meals that are SAFE for everyone, and thereby ensuring that Clarity meals are guaranteed allergen-free. Anything less shows a complacency for the current system, which actively hurts students.”

Cottrell also suggested having a member of the Wellesley College administration or staff member from the Office of Accessibility and Disability Resources in charge of holding Wellesley Fresh accountable. 

“Wellesley Fresh has broken so many of its promises and generally has a nonchalant attitude toward these problems,” said Cottrell. “I was told on two separate occasions by Wellesley Fresh that a Clarity station would be in every dining hall [this year] and that there would be lots of gluten-free options in Tower, like cereal, sandwiches, etc. That was a lie.” 

In the Nov. 11 meeting, administration promised to work with Jim Wice of the ADR to get kitchen access for students who need it and take these concerns to Vice President Piper Orton, who oversees AVI. 

Two days later, Dean Horton followed up via email with students who attended the meeting. ADR would work to grant kitchen access to those who need it, she wrote, and the Gluten Sensitive Room would reopen in Bates with frozen and made-to-order meals at the end of the week of Nov. 16. She also wrote that Clarity meals would continue to be available at Lulu and Bates, the two dining halls without a Clarity station. Before then, Lulu had not been consistently providing an allergen-free meal, and the option at Bates was pasta. 

A Clarity option was added to the lunch and dinner menus at Lulu beginning Dec. 6 after a student approached staff about their failure to consistently provide an allergen-free option up until then. Through the end of the term, Bates’s Clarity option continued to be pasta for both lunch and dinner.

The Bates Gluten Sensitive Room did reopen — later than promised, on Nov. 27 — with snack items like hummus, yogurt, and bagels, along with frozen microwavable meals. There was no menu of fresh meals from which to choose, as the email had said there would be.

Eleanor Nash ’21, who is gluten-intolerant, took extra frozen meals to have as a back-up. “If there’s nothing in the dining hall for me to eat, then I can eat it,” she said. 

But students who are more sensitive to gluten are angry that Wellesley seems to be substituting frozen meals for the meal plan. When Cottrell found out that the Gluten Sensitive Room was only offering TV dinners, she had her mother email administrators, since she thought a parent’s concerns would be taken more seriously, and her mother has not received a response. “I’m just left here hanging wondering whether Wellesley Fresh is actually trying to pull off giving me (and other students who solely eat out of the GS Room) only frozen meals,” said Cottrell. 

The last of the College’s promises did come to fruition, at least for one student. A senior with celiac got kitchen access after having her doctor contact ADR and Dean Horton. “It for sure helped,” she said, “but the process should not have taken two and a half, almost three months, as I was hungry and malnourished during that time period.”