If We Had Met Then

Tomiko T. Smalls

CREATOR’S NOTE My inspiration came from my experiences as a nontraditional doctoral candidate who sometimes struggled to find a sense of community in higher ed. Each word is a manifestation of my thoughts about feeling invisible as a female Black doctoral student while navigating the educational space with success. The shape of the work brings both the words and image of my portrait to life.

Do you ever wonder what your favorite magazine (The Chronicle, of course) was up to back in the olden

days? Did you know we used to have ads? We also used to make 4 magazines a year at some point. And you had to

pay for magazines. We also once were Semantics for some reason. I’m not really sure what happened there.

One of the things we have done a couple of times was poll the study body of Clemson. We first surveyed in 1969,

1985, and 2000. We will post the questions and all the results on the next page but let me tell ya, they are quite

interesting. Some of these questions I couldn’t believe we even once had to ask, and the responses from it are just as

surprising.

You might be wondering why we didn’t poll again this year since it has been 22 years since we last polled

and also we are celebrating 125 years. We tried to, and we started too. But polling here at Clemson is hard, and the

big man who decides what gets polled just wasn’t understanding what we were trying to do. So if you happen to be

that big man who decides who gets to poll: WE ARE NOT POLLING. WE ARE NOT DOING RESEARCH. WE ARE

SIMPLY REPUBLISHING THE QUESTIONS. WE ARE NOT ASKING FOR ANSWERS. IF SOMEONE JUST SO

HAPPENS TO TELL US ALL OF THEIR ANSWERS, THAT IS THEIR DECISION, NOT OURS. THANK YOU.

We hope to do a lot of fun things in the future as well. Maybe we can design a whole new poll and actually get to do

it. Maybe we can have a whole entire concert with our old friends WSBF. Maybe we will change our names again, I

kind of like Semantics. Let us know how we can change for the better by leaving us love letters outside our door in

Hendrix 307 or by sending us an email at clemsonchronicle1897@gmail.com. We might answer you.

We’ve changed a lot these last 125 years, and we are glad to have you here with us.

Love,

Maille Gray