By Jazmine Hughes, former Editor in Chief ’12
In the spring of my senior year, I, along with other former Voice editors Ipek Bakir, Ethan Harfenist, and David Liakos, wrote an editorial about how senior privileges have receded. We were bitter: senior parking had just been eliminated, housefellow positions were being opened up to juniors. A year prior, the class of 2011 had a graduation scare when the administration tried to stop the additional student speaker in the wake of the Peter St. John scandal.
But the classes of yore never realized how good we actually had it: last week’s cancellation of Fishbowl made it the least productive work day I’ve had in a very long time. Seniors, underclassmen, and alumni alike were outraged at the termination of one of the most memorable, awaited days of our Conn Coll experience.
To be fair, in the aforementioned editorial, the group disparaged turning senior activities into a booze-fueled and -focused events. To deny or even ignore that alcohol plays a large part in Fishbowl would be foolish and dishonest; but Fishbowl isn’t about drinking. It’s about taking control of a campus that has been your home for the past four years, alongside people you’ve met and loved and hated and barely knew and saw one time and haven’t seen in two years. It’s about letting the stress of the past four years out, embracing the stress of impending graduation. It isn’t simply a booze-filled night of danger, which is the excuse that the college and the student decision makers are hiding behind. The Fishbowl killers seem to forget that the activity is a choice: in no way are students obligated to attend Fishbowl, to run to Castle Court, to get inebriated, to remove any clothing. It is left up to each individual to take responsibility for their own actions– if we learn one thing after four years, this should be it. Want to make students’ partying safer? Bring kegs back onto campus, get reliable transportation to and from bars, make Cro Bar a homier place. We’ve been saying this for years; is anyone listening? How is keeping students from a run going to change anything?
I think the majority of the upset lies in the removal of yet another tradition, out of seemingly few, particularly amidst discussions that Conn is “just another nescac school”, a nameless, homogenuous liberal arts college with a pretty campus and smiling faces. We need to embrace the traditions that keep Conn what it is– our school isn’t just special because of the small classroom sizes or the impressive financial aid statistics, but because we have cool stuff like shared governance and chicken tenders day and naked runs.
Almost every Conn student arrives onto campus their first day looking to create a new home; almost every student, I truly hope, leaves knowing they have. What’s a home if you can’t run around naked?
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I think you were underage at the time of fishbowl..
Running naked before turning 21 is exactly as illegal as running naked after turning 21. Also, who gives even a Dunkin’ Donuts Munchkin(TM)-sized fuck?
Been running naked since 1991! Proud of it!
and you sir, are attempting to be witty while trolling, and failing.
I completely disagree–subconsciously or not, students aim to get blackout drunk on fishbowl so that they will take their clothes off later in the evening.
On another note, this doesn’t make any sense and isn’t a complete sentence. “I think the majority of the upset lies in the removal of yet another tradition, out of seemingly few, particularly amidst discussions that Conn is “just another nescac school”, a nameless, homogenuous liberal arts college with a pretty campus and smiling faces.”
Unless someone just wants to run naked for the fun of it and ends up doing it sober. After all, if the event was just about getting blackout drunk, I’m not sure there would be as much hoopla about it being cancelled.
Grammar nazi? Don’t criticize you get her general point, don’t you?
And also…she did say ‘alcohol does play a huge part’ so there’s nothing for you to really disagree about.
Awkward… it is a sentence, and does make sense.
Though we as seniors are all pissed off about the nixing of fishbowl, especially within the canon of removed privileges we have endured throughout our ConnColl tenure (last year of kegs in common rooms was spring 2009, three months before we got here, to name one of many), it is important to view fishbowl’s cancellation with a balanced perspective. 99% of seniors, year in and year out, have a validating and incredible experience on fishbowl. 99% of us get hammered, get naked, and symbolically “tak(e) control of a campus” that has been only somewhat our own for the past four years.
So what about the fact that last year a girl reached for a policeman’s gun during fishbowl? What about the girl sitting in her chair in cro throwing up all over herself? What about the fact that Conn was mere inches away from a serious law suit due to the numerous counts of abuse that occurred during the fishbowl dance? You may argue that these things go on at every cro dance, but the reality is that fishbowl last year was much, much worse. What senior or alum is going to come forward AGAINST the experience of fishbowl? Those students are silenced by the awesomeness of the experience, for better or for worse.
At this point allow me to be clear. Despite the egregiousness of these actions, I am not necessarily arguing that the administration was given good and fair reason to eliminate fishbowl completely. My issue lies in the way the administration has elected to handle the situation thus far, and how fishbowl changed last year. A couple of things:
1. The administration has absolutely no problem with the naked run aspect. The lock-in boozing was the element that they aimed to eliminate.
2. Dean Denard, who spearheaded this decision and whose name accompanied the email to seniors, chose to have the informing email sent out in a week when she was out of town, albeit representing a great recruiting program in Chicago. This will obviously keep her from attending what should be a very exciting SGA meeting tonight.
3. No students were involved in the decision to remove fishbowl. The senior class council and SGA were presented with the “reality” that there would no longer be fishbowl. There was no “consultation” or “discussion”. The senior class council was told to think of a replacement idea. For this reason, scapegoating any student leaders, including SGA President Taylor Gould, is blindly ignorant.
4. Last year was the first time that seniors were made to use drink tickets in fishbowl. Before last year, the event was all-you-can-drink. This is an especially revealing fact. If you are a collegiate senior, the reality of the situation is that, unless fishbowl is your first night drinking ever, three drinks on three tickets is not going to provide the kind of end-all-be-all senior blow-up event that many seniors believe they have earned. Introducing the drink tickets effectively pushed the drinking out of cro and behind closed doors, so that students were forced to pregame the shit out of fishbowl. Students showed up shitfaced, blacked out, and the school was serving them alcohol and playing dance music. This is another fact that the school cited as a reason they wanted to cancel fishbowl. Before last year, students would show up to fishbowl relatively sober, drink and get drunk slowly with their classmates on school-provided booze, dance, and eventually get naked and go for the run. Last year, hammered students showed up to fishbowl already near-nude, drank maybe one or two drinks, shed their final layers, and ran.
The problem here lies only partially with the students: The college’s patronization of 22-year-olds by limiting them to a “healthy” three-drink maximum had the opposite effect. Students pregamed harder than they ever had before, knowing that nudity would be the eventual goal of the night. The college wrote its own deathwish with those bracelets, and the consequences speak for themselves.
Moving forwards, the school is committed to making the event that replaces fishbowl absolutely epic. They are throwing money at the idea, and want to create a new tradition. Before we let them do this, however, a few conversations need to happen. The college needs to enumerate how and why fishbowl is no more, and what parts of fishbowl they had problems with. They need to engage in a conversation with students about how to make fishbowl work, and if the consensus is that it can’t work, to talk to students about why and to address those issues.
But do your part as students and alumna(e) as well. Know the facts, and don’t turn to anger immediately. Try to understand where everyone is coming from, and why things are going the way they are. Please do not fall victim to the trap of attributing circumstantial issues to individual dispositions. The people involved in this situation are people, and the administration is composed of people too. They don’t hate fun. I promise.
In closing I encourage as many of you as possible to attend SGA tonight, and to listen to what is said, formulate your own opinions, and organize yourselves accordingly. If the consensus is that fishbowl can be brought back, let’s bring it back, and do it right. No more fucking drink tickets. Just a class of awesome individuals coming together for one of the best traditions this college has to offer.
shaq
EDIT: Dean Denard just sent out an email stating that she will be at SGA this evening, and attempting to explain the administration’s decision. I have included the full text of the email below.
I would love to hear from some of these class leaders about how much “consult” they had in terms of the fishbowl decision. To my knowledge, the first conversation that the administration had with student leaders was informing them that fishbowl was cancelled, and asking them to come up with a new event. If this is not the case, please come forward and correct me. I would also love to hear which students were tapped to have conversations from the administration following last year’s fishbowl. Here is the full text of the email:
Dear Seniors,
There have been a number of questions regarding the decision to cancel the event known as “Fishbowl.” I plan to be available during the SGA meeting this evening to address many of these questions, but I thought it would also be helpful to answer ahead of time a few of the questions that have come up most often.
Some people seem to think we didn’t first try to put additional safety and security measures in place before making the decision to cancel the event altogether. Over the last several years, we have tried to address concerns by putting precautionary measures into place. After last year, it was clear that it was becoming increasingly difficult to control this event and we could no longer assure the health and safety of our students and staff.
Before making the decision to cancel the event, we did our due diligence. We did a full review of last year’s event that included:
– Conversations with students and staff who were at the event,
– Records of student and staff comments made last year immediately after the event,
– Other colleges’ events and policies,
– Comments and reactions of New London fire and rescue officers who were called to the campus,
– Campus Safety reports,
– Liability issues for the College and
– Discussion among senior administrators.
And we consulted senior class leaders. That doesn’t mean we asked their permission. That means we talked about it with them before making the final decision and gave them an opportunity to express their opinions. We noted their disappointment and were encouraged by their maturity in understanding the decision. We worked with them to develop a plan that would give all seniors an opportunity to create a new tradition that would be more in line with the College’s values.
Some students have asked about shared governance and its role in the decision-making process. We were sensitive to this and that’s why we discussed it with student leaders. Students on this campus have much greater involvement in the decision-making process than at many colleges and universities, but College administrators have a responsibility – legally and morally – for the health and safety of all students. We have to be able to make decisions that protect our students and the long-term health of the College.
Change of traditions happens on all college campuses, and while there is initial disappointment, classes have gone on to claim new traditions proudly as part of their history. Those new traditions can become an important part of the contours of history at their alma mater. I understand your disappointment, and hope that we can work together to establish something that will make us all proud.
I look forward to tonight’s discussion.
Sincerely,
Carolyn Denard, PhD
Dean of the College
A reform of the system is called for, perhaps formalizing the informal “soft” student body wing of “shared governance”. I cannot speak for pre-2008, but public forum and large scale student discussion of issues at Conn seemed to be go through death-throes in ’08-09. And even then it was quite flowed in focusing on dorms at central units, which tends to lead to internalizing problems as looming and unchangeable or externalizing them as discussions of particular blame.