In last week’s Voice, President Nugent was quoted in an article as saying, “As some of our students learned when they attended a national student leadership conference, their fellow students from other campuses were aghast that ‘where to party’ seemed to be the biggest student life issue on the Wooster campus.”
I would like to clarify that, at least from my perspective, “where to party” is not the biggest student life issue on campus, and to characterize students’ concerns in that simple phrase is a gross oversimplification that demonstrates how little many administrators understand about our lives at Wooster.
“Where to party” is only one symptom of larger issues that I’ve heard about, witnessed, or dealt with personally many times as a senior at this school. It’s frustrating to hear that our college’s top administrator sees this concern as a demonstration of how shallow Wooster students are. “Where to party” is anything but a shallow issue.
That’s because “where to party” represents and encompasses some of the most challenging and complex problems Wooster students deal with in their time here. “Where to party” includes issues like sexual assault and binge drinking: if students feel they have nowhere to go to relax without being scrutinized by campus staff, they aren’t going to just stop drinking and attend alcohol-free events, like administrators seem to think. They are going to pile into tiny rooms to binge drink before going out, if they go out at all. Or they’ll go off campus, to parties that can’t be regulated by administrators.
I think some of the events of last semester, including the drugging of nine students at an off-campus party, have been enough to show that safety suffers when students feel they have to escape, rather than work with, administrators because they don’t know “where to party.”
“Where to party” also encompasses the mismanagement and confusion regarding college policies that students often have to put up with at Wooster. Case in point: the new alcohol policy — which was sent to students for comment on Tuesday — has now taken more than seven months to come even close to being passed, even though we were promised much quicker results. The resulting policy seems to look much like the old policy, even though students on the Alcohol Task Force were involved in its creation. Some students on the task force told me for a previous article in the Voice that they fear the final policy will bear little resemblance to the policy they hoped to create.
And what the new alcohol policy can’t solve, no matter what it looks like, is the fact that the culture at Wooster has shifted to one in which students feel free to ignore policies that are put in place by the administration because those policies demonstrate so little understanding of the reality of student life. Our school’s policies regarding parties and alcohol — or “where to party,” if you prefer — have become so removed from the reality of life at Wooster that any new policy that doesn’t truly, meaningfully involve students and their ideas (and I suspect the new alcohol policy does not) will be nearly worthless. Students will likely continue to ignore it as they already do, and our school’s governance and administration will have demonstrated that even their best efforts at change have little effect on students.
So no, “where to party” is not the biggest student life issue on campus. And to say so is irresponsible. We have bigger issues to solve and if administrators can’t even recognize that, we are in trouble.
Students, if you feel your voice wasn’t heard in the creation of the new alcohol policy, be sure to read it and send your comments to Campus Council before they consider the policy for a final vote. After all, you’ll be the ones who have to live with it.
Maddi O’Neill, an Editor in Chief for the Voice, can be reached for comment at MOneill16@wooster.edu.