Fight For Your Right to Party
Benedetto Maniscalco | October 6, 2022
The 2022-23 school year at Warren Wilson College (WWC) is well underway. Students want to gather, but their efforts are in vain. They struggle to hold parties close to campus and have taken to moving them further away which has added risks beyond the concern of over intoxication.
Faculty all the way up to interim president Bill Christy are well aware that the students on campus will find one way or another to gather and celebrate.
“Look, students are going to get together and have a party, nobody is dumb enough to think that's not going to happen,” Christy said.
Several times this semester, students have gathered in hopes to party and enjoy the weekends despite frequently being met with Public Safety.
“If they're somewhere blatantly violating a lot of rules, openly smoking weed, I mean, at some point public safety has to do something and then that's a difficult situation that can lead to conflict,” Christy said.
The usual response of students seeing Public Safety approach a party is to flee in search of another pasture to resume the festivities in.
“I know that people are definitely going out further into the green spaces when they're trying to hang out with their friends,” Mac Clarke, a sophomore studying philosophy, said.
There has been a noticeable shift in the presence of Public Safety on campus within the last few years.
“I feel like in my time here they have started patrolling more regularly in a lot of places,” Clarke said.
Clarke expressed that safety should be more focused on regulating student gatherings.
“A lot of student parties that happen under the radar take place in pastures which are very far away and I know I have personally walked back like more than a mile on roads in the middle of the night and that is pretty unsafe, people drive pretty fast.” Clarke said.
This is a very real concern, as in the past a student has been hit by a car walking the roads back from a party in a pasture according to Jon Davidson, Director of Public Safety.
“A student fell in the road while they were drunk and got hit by a car, so when you go further out and you walk in further, there's a lot of risks,” Davidson said.
Christy experienced a very different WWC when he attended in the late 70s and agrees that it is much safer for students to gather closer to campus.
“Back when I went to school here, the drinking age was 18 for beer and they served beer at Glatfelter,” Christy said. “The great thing is you didn't have to drive anywhere and so if somebody went and had too much beer, they just had to stumble up to their dorm, they didn’t get in a car, and that actually makes a whole lot of sense to me.”
Davidson made it clear that Public Safety isn’t against letting students gather closer to central campus
“If there's a large gathering and you're not violating any rules — have a great day continue on,” Davidson said. “But if we walk up and we find alcohol or there's a fire, we have to address those issues.”
A factor that has added to the regularity of Public Safety visiting pastures, known to be common gathering spots for students, is to enforce campus fire regulations more strictly.
“Under the current policy, students have to go through student activities,” Davidson said. “If they approve it, then you have to go to outdoor leadership and they bring the grill and they set it up. So we don't intervene if it's going through those steps, other things that we would intervene if there's a fire in the pastures we can't have fires in the pastures.”
There are several forms that students can fill out and bring to student activities if they want to make a gathering official. With current policies at these gatherings students over 21 are still not permitted to have alcohol outside.
Clarke, who has gone through this process consistently to host student concerts, finds that the level of formality required is too much to ask of students.
“We are technically allowed to have fires, but the process to go through and get one is not conducive to just going out and doing a fire with your friends when you feel like it,” Clarke said.
Clarke also advocates for the importance of student gatherings involving fire pits.
“I want fires to be back,” Clarke said. “I think that's a really important part of student life. I had a lot of memories around a campfire — particularly my freshman year — and we're mostly here when it's cold so if you really want to hang out outside, you will want a fire.”
These forms can also be used to make any type of gathering an official one, which will put it on Public Safety’s radar, but will take away from the likelihood of it being completely shut down.
“If you follow the actual procedures, you can have parties all day long,” Davidson said.
Even in official gatherings, students over 21 are still not allowed to have any alcohol, but according to Tacci Smith, Interim Dean of Students at WWC, this policy may be one that could be changed at the student government level.
“We don't have a campus that allows alcohol at parties right now, if students want to work through student government and see if that can change, then do that,” Smith said. “But students haven't done that, at least in the time that I've been here, nobody's challenging that policy.”
Even despite these policies, there was a time where parties were a constant happening on campus, according to Davidson, and they were set up through the official forms and would be able to continue so long as students didn’t have alcohol within the official meeting place of the gathering.
“When I came here in 2004, there were way more parties,” Davidson said. “There were parties every single week, and it'd be three or four dorms that had their own party every weekend. They were loud, they were crazy, you couldn't bring alcohol outside but we didn't go inside unless we had a reason to go inside. So you can have these things, you just gotta do it the right way.”
“We have these spaces to be used like all the common rooms and whatnot,” Clarke said.
Clarke thinks that the presence of an authority like Public Safety makes students feel pressure to disperse from gatherings or to find parties elsewhere.
“I think we all understand the feeling that you have when there's a figure of authority around and I think that a lot of their efforts are ending up driving students towards more dangerous situations like going off campus to go to a house party.”
Clarke shares a desire with other students in the want for more parties on campus that can keep going without being broken up.