Dear Smithies,
I have turned off the submit option for all three blogs. There will be no new posts to Overheard at Smith, Smith Professor Quotes or SmithieComplaints. The phenom has run its course.
I started these blogs as a joke to myself that became a huge part of the Smith online community. Poking fun at Smith was my way of expressing a deep affection for the campus and the people who populate it.
But in the nearly 3 years I've been running these blogs, I have received downright nasty submissions and I have received a lot of passive-aggressive "My complaint is that you never update" messages. I've read racist, transphobic & classist complaints and I've deleted them all. Policing the space that I created for Smithies to express affection and good-natured teasing got to be too much. Especially while Smith as an institution struggles with these things, and while I can see the nasty ways in which Smithies will talk about other humans when given a venue to do so anonymously.
SmithieComplaints was a blog about privilege, it was about how Smith College produces a certain type of complaint that would never cross the mind of most people. My personal favorite complaint of all time was "I can't tell if I'm conscious of my privilege or falsely conscious of my privilege." The submissions I get now are not true to the tongue-in-cheek tone I intended when I began the blog. They are self-congratulating, smug, and redundant.
I'm proud of the way I ran these blogs and I'm glad you all enjoyed them. I won't delete them-- they're here as a testament to what Smith's online community looked like from 2010-13 and how a college that costs 50k a year still can't manage to teach students what a satire is. These blogs were never about me, they were about all of us, and how fucking terrible we could be and how we could still laugh at ourselves.
Sincerely, SmithieComplaints aka Sarah Fitz '13J