Some campus residents don’t seem to have enough respect for where they live or for the housekeeping staff that cleans up their messes. I feel like I can’t walk across the campus without kicking up a Natural Light can or a nightclub flier with a scantily clad and apparently very excited young woman on the front.
Some campus residents show a lack of empathy for fellow neighbors and Residential Facilities employees. Saturday night, I sat in my room with a couple of friends while we watched a movie. Outside my South Hill suite, we heard commotion among partying residents in the courtyard below; nothing too abnormal for a Saturday night in College Park.
Someone in the courtyard or inside of the building thought breaking windows might be a good idea. I watched shattered glass spill from the fa?ade of the building and into the courtyard as the hooting and hollering fools destroyed eight windowpanes. When I came downstairs in the morning, broken glass and empty beer cans littered the Calvert Hall entrance and courtyard.
On Monday, I spoke with a group of Resident Facilities employees cleaning up the rest of the glass. After talking with them, the incident with the broken windows didn’t sound too out of the ordinary.
“Welcome to our world,” said Marion Stukes, the South Hill zone supervisor for Residential Facilities, holding up a broom and dustpan while he swept the windowsills and steps of Calvert Hall and feet crunched pieces of glass on the ground.
They mentioned trash being dumped and left in the hallways for weeks at a time and having to make repairs where residents have plowed into walls. Trash and destruction are the worst – surprise! – after basketball games. Deborah Smith, a Residential Facilities employee, said that her biggest clean-up jobs come then. She has to deal with the mess whether the Terps have a big win or a disappointing loss.
“Either way, there’s no winning,” she said about the trash that litters the dorms and the campus.
The trash residents casually discard makes the campus an ugly place to live and an ugly place for visitors to see. I know campus tours come through the South Hill area. Seeing broken windows and courtyards littered with shards of glass doesn’t make the university look like a friendly place to live.
“It looks like the ghetto,” Smith joked about the broken windows.
Someone also has to pay for the windows to be repaired. Each broken pane means money you and I have to pay out of our tuition for the repair and the replacement window. The efforts to clean up and fix the windows are measured by the time and material needed to do the job, Stukes said.
Seeing trash left by students makes the campus – the place I call my home for eight months a year – look bad. Talking about this problem with dejected Residential Facilities employees who have to clean up after residents makes me feel ashamed to be a part of the community. We owe it to the housekeeping staff to not leave the campus a mess because it has to put up with enough of our trash already.
Rectifying the behavior isn’t tough: Put your trash in trashcans and Dumpsters, and avoid making stupid messes like breaking windows and busting through walls. Eat, drink and be merry all you want, but don’t leave your cans or Styrofoam containers lying about.
Though I suppose a few broken windows and beer cans are a relatively small matter in the grand scheme of things, the carelessness reflects the overall apathy residents have for our campus and facilities. Your mamas don’t live here. Show some class and start picking up after yourselves.
Patrick Reaves is a sophomore journalism and history major. He can be reached at jreaves@umd.edu.
