STAFF EDITORIAL
Who saw the thong on the steps on lower campus last week?
How about the damage to classrooms all over campus, such as the Business Division that has a hole punched in one of the walls?
Furniture and other school property in dorm buildings has been broken, and a general lack of respect for the campus has been on display lately.
Spilled food and drinks and half empty takeout boxes from the Cafe can be found all over campus.
A bicycle was left chained to a pole on Greek Row for more than a year before campus maintenance just this week tried to remove it. The attempt was unsuccessful due to the amount of rust on both the chain and the pole.
The damage was the doing of careless students, who didn’t see a reason to be respectful to school property.
Maybe telling students to pick up after themselves sounds like the kind of lecture everyone’s mother gave them in junior high, and we should have grown out of it by now.
But destructive behavior on campus speaks for itself.
It can’t be that students are not capable of being tidy. Pepperdine is one of the top 100 universities in the United States, so most of us must be intelligent.
If we are intelligent and educated people, we should be able to remember where we left our thong underwear, especially if it was left in a public place.
Pepperdine students, if nothing else, have a reputation for being very concerned about appearances. It seems that this desire to make everything look good would extend to our school grounds.
Maybe the real problem isn’t whether we are capable of campus maintenance. The real problem may be that we are so used to others doing these basic tasks for us that we have forgotten that we are still responsible for our own messes, even if we make those messes at Pepperdine.
Campus maintenance does a fantastic job of keeping our campus looking great (check out the Princeton Review ratings for most beautiful campus). It is great to have a staff willing to do the jobs even parents complained about, like mowing the grass in front of each residence hall or vacuuming shared spaces in our dorms.
But the staff just doesn’t have the time to do everything for us, especially if students aren’t doing their part to keep campus clean and looking like a top 100 school.
How long does it take to pick up your tray in the Cafe and carry it to where we’re supposed to leave them, instead of leaving things on the tables?
It isn’t difficult to put chairs back in the classroom we found them in, or to keep personal items picked up in residence hall common rooms.
Making an effort not to break furniture is even easier, and when accidents happen, reporting them and being apologetic nearly always smooths over the situation.
It’s also easy to obey the basic rules on campus that help to keep it clean. Some of them are often forgotten by students, like rules on not bringing food or drinks other than water to class. Most students are not so busy that they will not be able to find time to eat before class, and few people have compelling reasons that they can’t wait an extra hour to eat lunch.
If eating in class is a necessity, make sure your professor is not bothered by it, and be discreet. And if something is spilled, take an extra moment to clean up the mess.
To take it a step further, hold a door for the maintenance staff when their hands are full, offer to help carry something that looks too heavy for someone to handle alone, or just ask someone how he or she is doing.
The effort to give a helping hand, even when it isn’t needed, can make someone else’s day, and contribute to a spirit of community and a more livable atmosphere at Pepperdine.
At the very least, keep your unmentionables in you drawers and out of sight.
01-19-2006