Letter: Students should be good neighbors
To the Author of the Open Letter to Mayor Ling:
There are many reasons why relations between CMU students and city residents “have become contentious.” Simply put, the residents I’ve spoken to are tired of student behavior.
I have been in Mount Pleasant 20 years, all of it as a CMU faculty member. I missed those legendary “End of the World” parties, but there have been plenty of other offenses during the 12 years I’ve lived in the neighborhood north of High and west of Main streets. In fact, WANA, the local neighborhood association, was formed in 2004 partly to deal with student misdemeanors.
Over the years my neighbors and I have dealt with vandalism, traffic congestion, litter and drunken students returning to campus from downtown bars, not to mention the fallout from assaults, streetfights and nuisance parties.
The funny thing is that the student population does not “dominate the city’s social scene,” it only thinks it does. This was clearly demonstrated at the CMU-city liaison committee meeting that took place on campus last November.
I know because I’m a member of that committee, and sat right next to Ian Elliott.
There was heavy student representation at the meeting from a combination of entities including Residence Life, the PanHellenic Council, and the SGA, and those students advocated strenuously for every student’s inalienable right to party.
The trouble with such arguments is that, while not only being callow, they are also unsustainable. Local residents obviously do recognize students as part-time residents.
Many members of the neighborhoods work at CMU and thus are neither afraid of nor made insecure by the presence of students near their homes. But the recent uptick in dumpster fires and loud house parties, combined with piles of abandoned furniture each spring during the annual homeward migration, gives some of us the impression that students aren’t really much invested in being “good neighbors.”
Tax-paying members of the community welcome the arrival of the new code enforcement officer because we know that it is not difficult to keep the neighborhood clean, but we also know that dense concentrations of people sometimes need reminding of this.
We also welcome Kathy Ling to the mayor’s chair. She has a history of support for neighborhoods, and will be well complemented by Vice-Mayor Allison Quast-Lents, and other pro-neighborhood members recently elected to the city council.
Perhaps your next overture to the community will be more successful.
May I suggest that a dram of humility included with some substantive recommendations might find a more welcome reception from the “paranoid minority of city residents.”
David Stairs
CMU Art and Design Department
Founder, Washington Area Neighborhood Association
