Last night Julia Cordray ’09 publicly acknowledged that she hung dozens of “Happy Birthday Hitler” posters on students’ doors last Friday. The posters, which featured an image of a marijuana leaf, a picture of Adolf Hitler and the word “REMEMBER,” were intended as a satire of last week’s similarly designed Holocaust Remembrance Day posters. Cordray expressed no remorse for her actions.
“These were meant to be a parody, and parody doesn’t work unless it shocks someone,” Cordray said.
Cordray made her identity public by posting an explanatory letter she submitted to assistant dean Charles Toomajin and a link to an essay written by a non-student friend on the Web site Ephblog.com. The letter detailed Cordray’s motives in distributing the posters: “The fliers were not intended to threaten anyone or take any position for or against marijuana or Hitler . . . but were a parody of fliers posted on every dorm door just a few days earlier.” The essay, titled “Students shocked, offended by ideas,” addressed the campus’s reaction to the posters. “A few were so outraged that someone dared to express an idea they disliked that they demanded censorship as a response,” wrote the friend. “They’ll serve the corporate world well one day as they crush anything they dislike.”
Half an hour before Cordray posted these items on Ephblog, President Schapiro sent an all-campus e-mail detailing the administration’s response to the posters. “It certainly does offend us and all those who value the well-being of our campus community and its members,” Schapiro wrote, noting that the student had said she will address the community in the near future.
Cordray said she did not publicly identify herself earlier because she was concerned about the effect it might have on the College’s disciplinary proceedings. “They were very vague,” she said. “The administration didn’t make it clear what my punishment was going to be, so I wasn’t sure [if I should go public]. But when I saw the e-mail today, it seemed pretty clear that it was all right to do so.”
Earlier on Tuesday, Dean Roseman had declined to name Cordray but confirmed that the disciplinary process was ongoing. “I haven’t made a decision yet about this case,” Roseman said. “We have the whole range of punishments available; I won’t know until I’ve spoken to her.”
A direct parody
Cordray had the idea to make mock remembrance fliers after encountering the Holocaust Remembrance Day posters that members of the Williams College Jewish Association (WCJA) posted on students’ doors April 15. Cordray said she regarded the sign as an invasion of her personal space. “I felt afraid to take it off,” she said. “Some friends and I were talking about it, wondering if we were allowed to recycle this dead Jewish person someone put on our door.”
In response, Cordray decided to create mock remembrance fliers, an act she thought would be amusing and would serve to comment on the invasiveness of the WCJA posters. “I thought it’d be funny to post some other kind of remembrance posters,” Cordray said. “My first thought was the Alamo – remember the Alamo – because I’m from Texas. But 420 came first, before any kind of Alamo remembrance day.”
April 20th, last Friday’s date, is both Adolf Hitler’s birthday and an informal holiday recognized by marijuana smokers and known as “420.” This coincidence dictated Cordray’s content choice for the posters. As she noted in her letter, “These fliers included images of a marijuana leaf and historical images of Adolf Hitler, which both bizarrely intersect each year on April 20.”
The satirical posters, which were designed by Cordray’s non-student friend, were modeled closely after the Holocaust Remembrance Day posters. The WCJA posters each featured a six-pointed star, a photo and a description of a person killed in the Holocaust, along with the word “Remember.” The newer posters had a similar layout, but replaced the face of the Holocaust victim with the face of Adolf Hitler and the Jewish star with a marijuana leaf. They had quotes from Hitler in place of descriptions of the peoples’ deaths.
“They were so similar that your eyes could easily have overlooked them as being the same,” said Walden Maurissaint ’07, a student who encountered the posters last Friday.
Identifying the culprit
Cordray and her friend hung the posters on other students’ doors as they walked to dinner on Friday, sometime between 4 p.m. and 6 p.m.
Maurissaint and Rafael Frias ’07 reported the posters to Campus Security around 6 p.m. The pair discovered the posters taped to bedroom doors throughout Morgan, after initially confusing them with the older Holocaust Remembrance fliers. Offended by the signs, they removed a number of them from the lower floors of the building and then called Security.
After examining the posters, Chuck Roberts, Security patrol adviser, led a campus-wide search for more of the signs. Security officers located posters in Morgan, East, Fayerweather, Prospect, Fitch, Lehman and Dodd House, removing them from doors in each dorm where they were hung. The Williamstown Police Department (WPD) was also called in to investigate.
Security officers and representatives from the Dean’s office used data from card swipe machines of the targeted buildings to narrow down a list of potential culprits. “We had narrowed it down to seven dorms, and simply put, there was only one individual who had swiped in to all seven dorms during that period,” Roseman said.
A Security officer was dispatched to Cordray’s room, something that she did not find surprising. “I wasn’t trying to hide or anything,” she said. “I mean, I swiped into every building [while putting up the posters].” When questioned, Cordray admitted to the act immediately and was escorted to Hopkins Hall for questioning by Toomajin, the dean on-call that night, and Jean Thorndike, director of Security. Corday was released to her dorm late on Friday evening.
Before Security identified Cordray, Roseman and Jim Kolesar, director of public affairs, drafted a longer, more serious e-mail than the one they sent to the College community that night. “We’d written a version we were about to send out,” Roseman said. “We know there are groups that go around college campuses and spread pro-Nazi propaganda; those are real and those are frightening.”
Just before Roseman sent the e-mail, however, Security pinpointed the student’s identity. “Once Security spoke to the girl, we realized we had to write a very different statement with a different tone,” Roseman said. “At that point, we just felt we had to let the community know we had the person, and that she had the reasoning she had explained to us. We didn’t feel this was something that was going to continue.”
Roseman sent a brief all-campus e-mail describing the incident at 9:44 p.m. on Friday night, informing students about the nature of the posters and the fact that the person responsible had been identified.
Posters draw heated debate
The responses to Cordray’s posters varied greatly, ranging from anger to amusement.
Many members of the College’s Jewish community were saddened or frightened by the signs. According to WCJA president Lauren Bloch ’09, a relatively small number of Jewish students saw the posters last Friday, as many were attending Shabbat services at the Jewish Religious Center (JRC). The students at the service learned about the posters when a Security guard came to the JRC to check if any posters had been placed there.
“There’s been a major response,” Bloch said. “Some peoples’ parents were offering to fly them home when they learned about the posters. People were crying on Friday. This is absolutely unacceptable, to have people feel scared, feel that there are people walking around campus who want to hurt them.”
Cordray said that she did not expect anyone to feel threatened or scared as a result of her signs. “I realized that people would be offended by the posters, but I didn’t realize that people would be threatened,” she said. “But then, people will be offended by what they want to be offensive.”
WCJA hosted a Town Hall meeting to discuss the posters on Sunday night. Seventeen students, College chaplain Rick Spalding and College cantor Bob Scherr attended the meeting, discussing the implications of the posters and the administration’s response to them. Some students expressed concern at the limited scope of the response and the short length of Roseman’s e-mail, while others criticized the posters as being insensitive and hurtful. Cordray said the deans encouraged her to attend this meeting, but that she was unable to because she had to attend rehearsal for a play that night.
Though Bloch said last night’s e-mail from Schapiro was an improvement on last Friday’s statement, “I think it doesn’t necessarily take a harsh enough tone . . . and the e-mail doesn’t change the fact that their initial response was inadequate.”
Some non-Jewish students were also deeply offended by the posters. “There are certain images that just get a response from people,” Frias said. “If there wasn’t any context, and you just saw a picture of Hitler being brandished on the door . . . it makes some people feel scared and it’s just unacceptable.”
Other students were less angry. Liz Campbell ’09, who posted on the WSO blog discussion regarding the issue, was angered by what she perceived as a double standard for hanging posters. “Either both [Cordray’s and the WCJA’s] posters are acceptable, or neither are,” she said.
Cordray said she had not personally encountered strong reactions to her posters, but had been told of people who were upset. “Since the [Friday] e-mail came out, all of my friends have come up to me and said ’Julia, we know it was you,’” she said. “None of them were offended, but they did tell me that a lot of other people were.”