With posters, criticism, and idealism in hand, it seemed as though Stuywatch, the self-proclaimed “unofficial guide to student rights and news at Stuy High,” would take root. Bright orange posters proclaimed their message: “We’re not anti-teacher; we’re pro-student.” Put simply: “Kids First.”
It was an interesting message—endearing enough that hundreds of students registered in the first week of its foundation. Forums were opened, and each day saw hundreds of topics cropping up within them, criticizing the school, government and general policies. Attendance on Stuywatch was probably second only to attendance on College Night.
And yet, two and a half weeks after its creation, the website sings a very different tune—all forums and messages are gone, replaced with a less optimistic message. “We’re taking a break,” the website explains. “We’ve been overwhelmed with the attention and conversations we’ve created. We clearly made some mistakes with using the forum effectively as a means of discourse. These mistakes won’t be repeated.”
Stuywatch’s hiatus comes at the heels of the founding of watchstuy.com, the site’s “rival”. The substance of watchstuy.com, which is largely satirical and whose purpose is “to make George Orwell jump out of his grave,” is poorly orchestrated. Its argument depends more on forming an antithesis to stuywatch’s message, rather than clearly articulating its own. But the first post provided one of the most substantive criticisms of stuywatch, where it simply proclaimed, “Stuywatch offers no real arguments and no real solutions.”
The hiatus only highlights these flaws, particularly stuywatch’s inability to effectively handle criticism. Hiro and Chase, supposed “defenders of discourse,” have spent much of their inaugural weeks regulating criticisms of stuywatch rather than being receptive to them. This regulation involved calling out and ostracizing students who actively passed judgment on stuywatch that was beyond flattering praise. In one extreme example a a student had his anonymity trampled by Hiro and Chase, who called out the student by his actual name, though the student had been using a pseudonym until that point. The later apology seemed hollow after the brutal, elitist response from two forum-masters who had claimed sophistication, maturity, and above-all, neutrality.
This isn’t the only example of Stuywatch’s ineptitude. An effort to unify the school has only polarized it further. “Kids First” is an admirable slogan, but a thinly-veiled “majority rules” will only get students so far when power is concentrated not with the students, but with the administration and faculty. Often, we criticize the administration for a lack of support and communication—but this works both ways. Stuywatch should be identifying with the administration and faculty to find some common ground to advance from, not drawing a line between “kids” and “everyone else.” Drawing this line only makes it easier for student interests to be ignored and various privileges taken away, particularly when what students want is seen as separate from what that school as a whole requires.
Despite the idealism stirred by labeling going out to lunch and having free periods “rights”, its necessary to term these privileges as exactly that—privileges. Some of the administration’s restrictive policies are legitimate; some are not. But, those restrictions that actually encroach upon real rights—the cell phone ban, for instance—are contested publicly, well beyond Stuyvesant’s gates. Dozens of court cases have questioned—and even now, threaten to overthrow—this ban. But no one is crying over students having to come in four minutes earlier from lunch, or scan in to school so that attendance for a 3,000-plus student population is just a little more accurate. Teachers have criticized stuywatch because of this—the entire student body, by association, becomes a group of “kids” who want only to complain immaturely about restrictions to non-existent rights.
It’s easier to talk than to listen. It’s easier to list differences than find similarities. But it’s time to stop taking the easy way out, stuywatch.