As Halloween went on its merry way through USC, Jason Porter and David Adelman worked to bring an early Christmas to McMaster College.
Through social media and sticker campaigns featuring images of Santa Claus, Porter and Adelman sought to highlight insufficiently heated classrooms at the School of Visual Art and Design. Class material and previous frustration with school officials motivated them throughout the campaign.
Though rooms on the infamously cold third floor are now decently warm, both students hope the campaign inspires USC students to take up causes of their own around campus.
Porter and Adelman’s campaign originated from a matter of circumstance. As graduate media arts students, the two attend a class in McMaster 334. Porter said that particular classroom has been “frigidly cold” throughout the fall semester, estimating the temperature to be in the high 50s or low 60s on most days. He now keeps a spare jacket in the McMaster graduate lab specifically for classes on the third floor.
When Porter and Adelman first complained about the temperature, school officials told them to bring up their discontent in end-of-semester evaluations. In the meantime, their only method of filing complaints was to talk to June Robinson, main office secretary for the School of Art and Visual Design. Porter found this answer “unacceptable.”
“I want to be able to talk to people about, ‘Why is it freezing? Please, turn the heat up. Why doesn’t the heat work?’” Porter said. “The official email we were supposed to go to would not answer questions like that.”
Adelman sympathized with Robinson, saying she should not be expected to bear the brunt of student complaints if she does not have the power to address them.
“I honestly don’t think that she is in a position on her own to make any changes,” he said. Regarding any concern that the campaign shames McMaster faculty, Adelman said he does not “think the goal is to particularly denigrate any particular person, it’s simply an attempt to get people to notice.”
It was not the first time Porter and Adelman faced difficulties with McMaster. On Oct. 19, the building’s lone elevator failed. Because of the situation, Adelman, who uses a wheelchair, could have been unable to attend classes on the third floor of the building. He said he was initially told only that repairs could take “up to two weeks.”
“It’s just interesting to me that the default position of this university seems to be ‘we’ll fix it, but we won’t let you know when,’” Adelman said.
Porter finally decided to take action after reading the 2015 book “Seeing Power: Art and Activism in the 21st Century” by New York-based curator Nato Thompson. Topics brought forth in class discussion of the book gave him an idea.
On Oct. 31, Porter created a Twitter account titled “Third Floor Santa” and began documenting his efforts to have the air conditioning fixed on McMaster’s third floor. In his first post the same day, Porter took a picture of himself wearing a curly white beard and wig while standing outside McMaster, writing that “This place looks cold enough for me!”
From the beginning, Porter tried to get in touch with USC student media, tweeting pictures of the campaign’s distinct stickers at The Daily Gamecock editors Kamila Melko, Mary Ramsey and T. Michael Boddie. He also tagged USC administrators, including university president Harris Pastides and provost Joan Gabel.
Porter also designed and printed hundreds of stickers featuring the Third Floor Santa Twitter handle. Throughout last week, he stuck them on lockers and windows, inside and outside of elevators and even above the thermostat on the third floor of McMaster.
Porter did not believe progress would be made overnight, and he was right. The third floor temperature stood at 61 degrees when Porter began posting on Oct. 31, and increased only a single degree by Nov. 2.
But on the morning of Nov. 3, Porter and Adelman entered McMaster to find that the internal temperature stood at 73 degrees. Though elated, they knew it was unlikely that the change came about as a product of the campaign.
“If they need parts to fix [the AC] they had to have time to order them,” Porter said. “So I understand that if it’s fixed now, this is something that has been in play before I started.”
The abrupt temperature change also nullified a portion of the Third Floor Santa campaign. Porter planned to decorate the third floor of McMaster as a “winter wonderland” over the weekend while few students and faculty remained in the building. After the heat was turned up, the idea became “redundant,” in his opinion.
Porter noticed something else that morning as well. Several maintenance workers loitered in the third floor lobby. Adelman assumed this was to deter Porter from posting more stickers.
“They’re not explicitly saying why they’re there,” Adelman said. “But it’s just interesting that this project has been going on for such a short time and then all of them are posted on the floor where this is centered.”
On Nov. 4, Porter tweeted through the Third Floor Santa account that only 48 of 300 stickers he put up remained in place. Shortly after, he decided to end the campaign, saying that it had come to a “natural end.”
In his final post, Porter tweeted an image of a torn Third Floor Santa sticker above a quotation from the Carolinian Creed: “I will discourage bigotry, while striving to learn from differences in people ideas and opinions.”
Peter Chametzky, the director of the School of Visual Art of Design and one of the individuals tagged in Porter’s tweets, acknowledged that some classrooms in McMaster may be uncomfortably heated. However, he denied that school administrators are unaware or unsympathetic.
“We know there are HVAC [heating, ventilation and air conditioning] issues in the building. We’re reporting them all the time,” Chametzky said. He also said that the practice of notifying the main office secretary of maintenance issues is simply “standard procedure”.
Chametzky also denied any knowledge of school officials having maintenance workers stationed in the third floor lobby on Nov. 3. Nor was he aware of why the thermostat on the third floor was adjusted 12 degrees on the same day.
Regarding the elevator breakdown, Chametzky praised Rebecca Boyd, the school’s coordinator for undergraduate student services, for her work in addressing the situation. As part of her job, Boyd handles the master schedule for all classes that are held in McMaster College. When notified that McMaster’s only elevator malfunctioned on Oct. 19, Boyd indefinitely relocated classes to floors accessible without use of stairwells.
Boyd said that to her knowledge no students were unable to attend class Oct. 20 or later because of ongoing repairs to the elevator.
Though he disagreed with claims made by Porter and Adelman, Chametzky said that students should always promptly inform administrators of technical issues occurring in McMaster.
“It’s always necessary to let us know that there are issues, in terms of the physical environment,” Chametzky said. “We always want to know about that, and we report [those problems].”
Despite his belief that the campaign did not seem to sway McMaster administrators, Porter said he does not see it as unsuccessful.
“I don’t view my campaign as a failure in the fact that it didn’t have the response I intended,” Porter said. “I view it as an evolution of changing what my expectations of success are on the project.”
When asked if he had any advice to say to USC students who want to maintain an active voice on campus, Porter said he did: “Just do it.”
But Porter cautioned that students must take steps to ensure that they are behaving within the boundaries of university rules. Prior to beginning the campaign on Oct. 31, Porter notified his academic advisor of the plan to make sure he would not be punished.
“I’m not actively encouraging people to go graffiti up the Horseshoe,” Porter said. “I’m not telling people to do that. But I think that if there are issues that people are having, to not think that ‘oh, the powers that be are going to fix it.’ Do something about it.”