Eric Batke
When I arrived on campus at the beginning of this past fall semester, I was very enthusiastic about the year ahead. In addition to the adrenaline-inducing thought of starting my I.S., my excitement over the social environment of Stevenson Hall, my new dorm, was abundant. “I am about to spend an entire year in a dorm with some of my closest friends,” I thought, “all but one of whom are 21, and the sole exception celebrates his landmark birthday next week!”
Unfortunately, my exuberance only lasted until our first dorm meeting; we were informed that our lounges would have to remain dry until the new Scot’s Key updates had been settled, despite the fact that the number of residents under the age of 21 was in the single digits.
Little did we all know that this short-term delay would become indefinite. Again and again we were told that a decision on lounge designation was forthcoming, yet the RAs seemed to be in the dark on the issue as much as we were. Now, finally, the revised Scot’s Key has been released, and what does the administration tell us? Every lounge on campus will remain dry through the end of this semester. To our administration I offer this completely sincere and not at all sarcastic or condescending response: “Gee, thank you for taking so long to deliver such an astute solution to this obviously complex issue!”
Is this really the best that the deans and ResLife can do? They cancel the old process of dorm-wide voting in lieu of a pending decision, only to inform the students that they have decided to just skip the middleman and delegate the lounges themselves, which they’ll get around to doing once the semester ends. We can’t even have open containers in a hallway which exclusively houses students over the age of 21. However, we are at least allowed to have our doors open so that we can mingle with one another in the doorways of our respective adjacent rooms.
According to the administration, their allowing the residents to vote on wet or dry lounges was the broken part of the practice, and they seem to have attended to that quite efficiently. However, I seem to remember a particular caveat hidden in the fine print of the voting process: if a student chose not to attend the voting occasion, their vote would automatically be marked as a “Nay” with respect to wet lounges. This made perfect sense, of course; in fact, it should be national policy that if a citizen abstains from voting for a presidential candidate, their vote should just be tallied for Ron Paul.
This entire fiasco is yet another example of Wooster’s administration being clueless to not only what the students want, but also what is best for the students. Oh, excuse me, I always forget; we came to this school to have our hands held. We may have “Independent Minds,” but the deans only seem to work with themselves.