Recently, Associate Dean of Students for Campus Life Amy Uecke and Assistant Dean of Students for Campus Life Curt Lauderdale came across a menacing scene in the SigEp house when looking for disrepair of the physical property — as a resident of the house with a seemingly permanent hole in my wall, I can tell you they take this job quite seriously. Not as seriously, however, as the small bag of “high-potency” marijuana they found sitting on a table.
The police were called into this risky and dangerous situation, and after ascertaining that the drugs did not belong to a member of the house, they searched the rooms of the students staying in the house over break — going in chromatic order by the darkness of skin, in typical APD fashion — and found no marijuana, but some pieces. They proceeded to change the locks, kicking all residents out for the remainder of break as well as locking us out of “our” “common” spaces.
Amy and Curt, along with Nancy Truesdale and Marianne Griffin, have tried to spin a narrative around this incident that places this at the zenith of the continuing activities in the SigEp house, making it a problem of our “user-friendly” environment, a house with a rotten culture. As my friends could tell you, I am an exceptionally optimistic person, and will therefore credit the creation of this false narrative to ignorance and not any vindictive feelings towards my organization resulting in inconsistently-enforced policy.
The Lawrence administration probably thinks we are such bad people because they only hear of us from their private security forces, or when we go in to deal with problems. The campus center isn’t a whole lot closer than Raymond House, but I still think that Nancy Truesdale could have made the tortuous journey more than twice in my four year tenure. Maybe Amy and Curt should come over sometime when everyone isn’t on spring break — that might be a better time to get who I am.
If the reality is that Jill Beck is going to be fundraising all the time, and the administration is to stay in their ivory tower of the Warch Campus Center, just whose job is it to work with college students? Sure, administrators have limited exposure to students through punitive and legislative avenues like J-Board and LUCC, but holding that up as an effort to reach out to students is as absurd as calling the almost satirical matriculation ceremony where Jill Beck shakes every freshman’s hand an effort to meet them.
I find it absurd that someone could make such broad and sweeping judgments about a whole group. Maybe these administrators who have problems with the “culture of my house” just don’t care to know anything about me besides that I am not breaking any rules they choose to enforce. Should they make the arduous trek across Boldt Way a little more frequently, they might see students in a more positive light.
– Mac Watson ‘11