Amelia Crowley
Contributing Writer
While reading Amanda Crouse’s Viewpoint about theft on campus, primarily the two times her and her roommate’s pig statue was stolen in Holden, I found many of the things she talked about resonating in my own experiences this year. I live in the German Suite in Luce Hall, which is currently located on the first floor. This is my second year living in the German Suite, though last year it was located on the second and third floors. Previously, I enjoyed living in the suite because it brought a sense of community and camaraderie that other dorms don’t necessarily afford to the students living in them. This was a large part of the reason I decided to return to the German Suite for another year.
However, this year has been riddled with problems for the German Suite. At the beginning of the year, we were all getting used to living in our suite, as we had just moved into the new space. We began the year by keeping the door that leads to the suite (which includes four rooms, a bathroom and a common room) open during the day, and one of us would close the door at night. This soon led to problems, as people who did not live in our suite would come into our space. This could be for various reasons: to use the bathroom, to look around or just because they were lost, which is understandable, as Luce can be a confusing building to navigate.
Unannounced visitors weren’t our only problems. Sometime last semester, the Bath and Body Works soap that one of my suitemates had bought for us to use disappeared from the bag that it was being stored in in our common room. This amounted to roughly $40 worth of soap, as he had bought it in advance for the rest of the semester. After this incident, we began to keep the door closed 24/7, at the advice of our RA.
We have also had problems with people coming into our suite at all hours of the night in search of a bathroom, particularly on weekend nights. It is no longer single people coming in like before, but entire groups of loud, disruptive people entering our space. Not only does this create a chaotic environment that disturbs us when we are trying to sleep, but we also find it unsettling. To try to combat this, we created a sign to hang on the door, making it clear that the suite was a language living and learning community and that the bathroom was not public (there are public restrooms located in the basement of Luce). This seemed to prevent most people from coming into the suite, though we still occasionally got a few past-midnight visits.
Then, earlier this semester, we received an anonymous note on the door that proclaimed, contrary to our sign, that “no, these are NOT private suites.” This passive aggressive comment left by an unknown intruder into our personal space unsettled us and left us on our toes for a week or two, but no more notes appeared.
Most recently, on Thursday, April 16, several of my suitemates and I returned from a German Honor Society event, only to find that our sign asking people not to come in had been ripped off the door, with only the edges hanging onto the tape left where it had been. This, coupled with Amanda’s Viewpoint, were the last straws for me. We have tried to be reasonable. All we want is to be able to live in peace. These incidents have made us say to each other time and time again “if only the suite was swipe-access only” or “I wish we had keys so we could lock the door to the suite,” but unfortunately, all we had was our sign.
I don’t know if these incidents have been caused by one single perpetrator or multiple individuals working alone, but whoever you are, I have a question for you: how would you like it if we came into your space, stole your belongings and ripped your decor off the walls? We’re trying to live in this community, and you are making our lives miserable because we don’t know what will happen next. Please think about your actions and leave us and the other residents of Luce Hall, as well as all the buildings across campus, alone. Lassen Sie uns allein! Danke, the German Suite.