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St. Cloud State University
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SCSU, stay out of off-campus life
By Bobby Hart
Published:
Monday, October 13, 2003
Bobby Hart -- Staff Essay
Attention all residents of Southside St. Cloud: lock your doors, bar your windows and head to a well-ventilated shelter. Sixteen thousand students will be on the loose, and somebody is feeding these darn kids booze. Homecoming weekend is near.
That seems to be the new public service announcement floating around St. Cloud after the recent riots at the University of Minnesota and MSU-Mankato that inflicted a combined $350,000 of damage. SCSU is so frightened that it received support from the state attorney general's office to enforce a more strict code of conduct to allow the university to punish students for off-campus activity. Of course they say this is due to the record number of arrests during move-in day. After that so-called public act of "careless disobedience," why shouldn't the city and university take the proper precautions, or a projected 60 plus officers on foot, bike and unmarked vehicles to be exact?
I'll give a couple good reasons.
First of all, if fear of another move-in day is really the issue, it shouldn't be. The only difference between this and any other recent move-in day of any major state college campus from Mankato to Duluth, was the SCPD. One hundred and eleven people were arrested for 257 violations, compared to the 35 tickets that were handed out last year. Only 71 of those people were actually students.
I was at the U of M football game over the weekend, which also generated a riot scare, and if I had 60 dedicated police officers or three Robo-cops, I could have handed out thousands of violations from campus to the Metrodome parking lots.
However, the Minneapolis Police Department didn't do this because they have bigger fish to fry in a city that directs its law enforcement to protect, not harass.
To the people that weren't adding up the citations to measure the damages, move-in day this year was no worse than it has ever been since I was greeted to the friendly confines of SCSU with signs such as "Drop your daughters off here," as a freshman three years ago. But, God forbid, those signs are now a form of harassment to a university and city that has no tolerance for humor.
Of course, the city also wants to protect the rights of the nonstudent residents that live in the Southside neighborhood as well. I see no problem with that, and these residents should not be forced out of their homes just because this is a "college town." But I do think that students and nonstudents should get equal rights, which is rarely the case.
There is a woman (probably in her mid 50s) that lives behind my house. She is more insane and drunk on a consistent basis than a combination of me and my seven other male roommates. Yet she calls the police on us "f-ing students," as she so eloquently calls us, at the most obscure times when we have no more than 10 people inside our house. Yet the police threaten us with noise violations when they should be committing our neighbor.
Secondly, if the university is worried about riots, which is understandable, go ahead and swarm the town with police, but students shouldn't be punished by the university for what they do with their lives outside of school. It's absurd to think that getting an alcohol violation at a party could lead to school suspension.
But, there is no sympathy for complainers and I don't want any. As a 21-year-old with a clean record, I'm not all that worried about getting in any trouble with school or the police. I'm just sick of worrying about turning my stereo one decibel too high or drinking a beer and placing one foot over a thin sidewalk line while throwing a football around with my roommates. Because now I'm literally one decibel or one foot away from academic punishment.
The fact of the matter is that we, as students, pay the university for education, not off-campus regulation or protection. Won't the 60 police officers be enough to take care of that?
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