The Post catches up with a handful of graduated activists and sees what they are up to in their post-graduate lives.
Tuition costs, rape culture and disregard for minorities all came under fire of student protests during the 2014-15 academic year on Ohio University’s campus.
The Post caught up with five graduated protesters from OU in order to see how their past activism on campus impacts their post-graduate lives.
Bekki Wyss
When Bekki Wyss arrived back in Athens for her junior year, Robin Thicke’s single "Blurred Lines" had just been released.
“It was just this horrifying realization that the whole campus was OK with playing this song everywhere and singing this song and continuing this mentality,” Wyss, a 2015 alumna with a degree in English, said.
The song has been called out for objectifying women and promoting rape culture, and, with the lyrics in her head, Wyss and other OU students founded F--kRapeCulture in fall 2013.
“It was this group of women, this group of very strong badass women who supported me and took these things I was thinking seriously,” Wyss said.
Now that she lives in New York City, Wyss said she worries less walking home than she did in Athens.
“I feel much safer going back to my neighborhood in the projects of New York than I have ever did walking down Mill Street, which I think says a lot about, kind of, the place I was moving into my junior year,” Wyss, who was a former columnist for The Post, said.
F--kRapeCulture, as well as OU Student Union, she said changed her life, and the people in the group made her last couple years of college “incredibly meaningful and wonderful.”
Wyss currently works for Cabrini Immigrant Services of New York City, an organization that works on immigration law, runs a food pantry and does a variety of social-oriented tasks.
She lives with Madison Koenig, a fellow OU alumna, along with the Missionary Sisters of the Sacred Heart of Jesus.
“I live around a community of strong, badass women who have done incredible things with their lives,” Wyss said. “They just happen to be 90 instead of 20 now.”
Madison Koenig
Former Student Senate President Nick Southall sent a Tweet on Sept. 1, 2013. It read: "Driving through Athens at 8:30 on Sunday morning is hilarious. I want to stop every girl I see and say, ‘your dress is a little wrinkly.’ ”
Those 137 characters caused Koenig to take a stand.
“The first action I participated in was going down to Student Senate for a speakout to tell him why that was slut shaming and why we weren’t OK with the president of our student body treating women like their sexuality was shameful,” Koenig, a 2015 alumna with an English degree, said.
She was involved with F--KRapeCulture, OU Student Union and Student Senate. She was the women’s affairs commissioner her senior year and organized the week of events for Take Back the Night in April.
“They were the only groups where they saw that there were issues on campus — especially with F--kRapeCulture," Koenig said. "I joined my junior year, and they were the the first group who really named the problem with rape culture on campus and then to unapologetically stand against it. I don’t have a lot, but I have my time and I have myself, and so I just kind of committed fully to doing what I could to help with those issues.”
She currently lives in New York City with Wyss and also works for Cabrini Immigrant Services.
Koenig, who hails from Cincinnati, hopes to stay in New York after her year of service volunteering and get a job in the nonprofit sector.
“The dream is to stay in New York for a couple years and figure out what I want to do for grad school,” Koenig said.
Claire Chadwick
On the afternoon of F--kRapeCulture’s first Homecoming march, Claire Chadwick said she and another founding member worried if anyone would show to support the cause.
“We came over the top of Jeff Hill and just saw tons of people standing at the bottom holding signs and banners and things like that, and it was just overwhelming how much support we had and how much people really cared about this issue,” Chadwick, a 2015 alumna with a specialized study degree in gender and social justice, said.
F--kRapeCulture was founded in fall 2013, with Chadwick as one of the founding members.
“We decided that we had an opportunity to encourage the administration, sometimes gently, sometimes pretty aggressively, to make policy changes that really showed that they supported and valued survivors of sexual assault, but also really working hard to shift the culture to really value consent and things like that,” Chadwick said.
She currently works at an organization in Colorado Springs called TESSA, a shelter for victims of domestic violence and sexual assault.
As community outreach coordinator for the shelter, she said she educates people about violence prevention at schools and military organizations in the city.
“I do view it as this is kind of a place where I need to be because there isn’t a very strong activist community,” Chadwick said, noting that she misses Athens. “There’s just a lot of work that needs to be done.”
Megan Marzec
Megan Marzec walked across the graduation stage in May, but her presence continues to be felt in Athens.
Marzec, the former OU Student Senate president, is going forward with her appeal of a disorderly conduct conviction, which stemmed from a protest of the OU Board of Trustees’ decision to raise tuition in January.
Marzec and two other defendants were charged in January and sentenced to 30 days in jail by Municipal Court Judge William Grim.
“This is an incredibly important appeal, as it will literally change the entire history of Athens in relation to public protest and set a new precedent for years of political actions to come,” Marzec said in an email. “How can we continue to have pride in our alumni who fought for justice in past decades while putting current students in jail?”
While at OU, Marzec was involved with Student Union, the Radical Left Alliance, Student Senate and Athens Coalition for Palestine.
Last September in a video she posted online, Marzec called on OU to distance itself from what she called “atrocities” in Palestine instigated by Israel. In the video she appeared to dump a bucket of fake blood on her head, which was red paint, tomato juice and water.
Marzec said her involvement with politics has not changed since graduation.
“I believe all actions we take in life are political,” Marzec said in an email. “The world is the same today as it was a year ago when I was receiving death threats, and necessitates the same level of struggle and the same politicality.”
Ryant Taylor
Ryant Taylor is using the activism skills he honed at OU — spreading word of strikes or protests — as part of his everyday job in Seattle as a boycott organizer for Unite Here Local 8.
His tasks range from passing pamphlets outside of Safeco Field to making phone calls to traveling to another city.
“It’s pretty multi-faceted, and it’s a job that requires you to be OK with bringing up conflict for the sake of making people realize how important their decisions are,” Taylor, a 2015 OU alumnus, said.
Taylor is not the average English major, he said, as he has experience and skills ranging from leafleting to leading protests.
Taylor, a Cleveland native, got involved with Student Union his junior year during the Restart campaign. He was the LGBTQA Affairs commissioner for senate his senior year and the organization coordinator for Student Union. He co-founded Black Lives Action Coalition (previously known as NewBLAC), and was formerly a columnist for The Post.
Taylor said the Student Union was a visible group on campus that was doing a lot of activism and he wanted to be a part of it.
“It made me a really conscious person and it definitely gives me a really, I guess, strong perspective on how I want to pursue life after college,” Taylor said.
@megankhenry
