by Hayley Adnopoz
As Park residents awoke on one of the first Sundays of the school year and walked down to Harris for a nice brunch, they found seven broken exit signs, pink paint splattered across a hallway and realized, as the dorm’s Housefellow Molly Murphy ’13 said, “someone mistook the elevator for a bathroom.” By her calculations, the exit signs alone would cost each resident around fourteen dollars.
Unfortunately for the Park residents, this behavior is not atypical. According to Murphy, there were an average of five broken exit signs per weekend in her dorm, and by October 9, they were on track to incur damage charges exceeding $200,000.
Park isn’t the only dorm that started off the school year with a struggle with vandalism. From August 30 to October 23, there were forty-seven incidents of criminal mischief or vandalism, whereas there were only thirty-one cases at this point in 2011.
Interestingly enough, this increase in vandalism is accompanied by a decrease in incidents involving alcohol. In fact, a decrease in alcohol incidents is starting to become a trend. By October 23, 2010, there were fifty-nine alcohol incidents. By October 23, 2011, there were fifty incidents. As of October 23, 2012, the number of alcohol-related incidents of vandalism has almost been cut in half; this fall we have seen only twenty-six reports of this nature.
“I am happy to see that the number of transports have decreased so far this year; this fact coupled with some positive data out of CC Curtis’s office shows that we are slowly making some improvements to campus climate and behavior around alcohol. SGA is always looking for input and feedback on campus climate and social scene, especially surrounding alcohol,” said SGA President Taylor Gould ’13.
Campus Safety Director Stewart Smith attended an SGA open forum to enlist Gould and the rest of the student leaders in remedying the problem. “One of the benefits of attending the SGA open forum is that it allows for a sharing of information and concerns between the Campus Safety department and the students. This allows us to keep the lines of communication open and we can address any issues that come up,” Director Smith said.
At the forum, one student asked Smith why the number of alcohol transports has decreased while the number of vandalism incidents has increased; it seems counterintuitive, there should be a positive correlation between the two. Director Smith responded that, “transports being down would suggest that students are not drinking to the point of needing medical assistance… It has been my experience that when students drink, their judgment is impaired and they do things they would not do if they were sober, such as commit acts of vandalism.”
SGA has helped Campus Safety to tackle vandalism with their Anti-Vandalism Initiative. According to Gould, vandalism is a “buzz word” for SGA this year. He says that their campaign includes the recent addition of cost stickers to popularly vandalized items, such as paper towel dispensers, and will soon expand to include both a poster campaign and campus-wide discussions about vandalism.
After the rocky start to the year in terms of damages, Murphy has noticed a palpable change in the Park environment. She partially credits this to SGA’s work. “With all those efforts from SGA, Res Life speaking to my dorm alone and the numerous direct e-mails I have had to send out, I have noticed an atmospheric change and with the feedback I have heard from many residents, it is clear that they now hold their fellow residents to follow a pattern of respect. I still challenge my dorm to go a week without any dorm damages, but in the end, it really comes down to a sense of pride and respect on campus. Absolutely enjoy your nights here at Conn – we’re in college…duh! But I’ve never heard a dorm damage bill to be a cure for a hangover!”
Gould shares these sentiments on respect: “Simply put, [vandalism] shouldn’t happen here. You wouldn’t break windows, exit signs or paper towel dispensers if you had them in your own home, so why do it here? Our campus is our home for the time that we are here, so we should respect our facilities and the staff that work so hard to maintain them.”
Students must raise their standards of themselves and each other. Once we can see that vandalism is unacceptable, maybe people will stop thinking it’s so hilarious to punch an exit sign.
