Southeast “Ignorance” Halls: Introduction

Sellery Hall and Witte Hall were built in 1963 and 1964, respectively.  And it shows too, because in every corner of the building there is inconvenience and inefficiency for residents.  The recycling bins are often overflowing to the point where students just throw their glass and paper down the garbage chute because they are tired from a long night of studying.  Other times the dirty bathroom sinks are clogged with noodles and other food because there really isn’t anywhere else for them to cook unless they go to one of the two kitchens located in the basement; two kitchens for 1,150 people to share.  More often than not, the showers and stalls for showers and toilets are all occupied, which can be very frustrating for people in a hurry to get to class quick in the morning, but have to either go down a few floors and search for open utilities or hold it until after class and be forced to show up to a lecture with a bad case of bed head.

While many students recall their days spent in these dormitories with a sense of nostalgia and pride, many others remember their first semesters of college as something quite the opposite.  Some remember most fondly the time that they threw bottles of hot sauce down the hallway and watched them explode in a shiny red blast on the wall, or early that one morning when the guy they urinated on a few floors down the night before went barreling through the halls screaming “Who peed on me?” and “Come out here, I’m going to kill you!” for half an hour.  In fact, the “excitement” involved with living at Sellery is nationally recognized; according to an article in Wisconsin State Journal, it is ranked “the seventh biggest party dorm (Ziff).”Still others recall the same instances with a bitter contempt; they remember stepping out their door one morning into a puddle of spicy goo and glass, or laying in their bed and being woken up with terror, hearing violent threats from some ogre standing outside their door echoing through the halls.  The stress of these types of situations added with all the new stresses involved with living without family for the first time can be too much for some; suicide is the second leading cause of death among college students (about.com).  They are two very different kinds of people, living in the college dorms for very different reasons; one for a good time, trying to live up to the standards of media representations of college life, and the other to become a respectful scholar.  There is certainly middle ground here; some students who can turn the other cheek and ignore the distractions of dorm life surely inhabit the dorms and sometimes participate in the drinking while maintaining a sense of respect for others and themselves.  However, to be able to merely shrug one’s shoulders in response to the vandalism and discrimination that occurs in the Sellery and Witte dorms probably requires more ignorance than the perpetrators themselves display.

During my time spent in Witte Hall, I was a victim of the hatred; I experienced all the above and then some.  In my time of residence I saw showers clogged with feces and left running so that the halls were flooded; I saw toothpaste smeared all over the mirrors; I saw people come together to create t-shirts which targeted a floor resident as an outsider; I saw people make lists outside their door of “fags”; and every weekend, I saw the same people who committed these oppressive acts face-down in the toilet, covered in their own vomit.

And so, after watching these events unfold, these things I could not have imagined any successful, college-bound individual to be capable of, I realized that the people disrespecting the dormitory environment and all that inhabited it were the same individuals who rejected the recycling bin in favor of the garbage chute, left the sinks clogged, filthy, and running, took ten-minute-or-longer showers, piled their food trays high at lunch and ate only half, bought cheap, unsustainable products, and left their speakers on full blast throughout the day even when they weren’t in their rooms.  I recognized that it was not just their current environment, the dormitory, which they were disrespecting, but more importantly the global environment they were destroying through their carefree actions.

The question, then, is why all the acting out?  Is the cramped and uncomfortable living space the cause of the frustration in the dorms, which in turn causes the violence and mindless waste?  Or, are Sellery and Witte being kept around as a sort of dumping ground for the University?  Is there a point to upgrading the almost fifty-year-old dormitories if the residents will just trash them anyways?  My hypothesis, unfortunately, is that the causation for the acting out is some culmination of media representations of college life and stories from older peers combined with the unnatural living conditions which dorm-style living inherently create.  It is for this reason that I believe the old dorms have stuck around so long.  The nostalgia and the sense of carrying on old traditions which is so important to our American society seem to overrule attempts at progress towards more efficiency and less waste.  For example, every year for the past four years, the group Big Red Go Green has held a month-long competition between these dorms to cut energy costs and reduce waste (Gunderson).  Though the article states that the campaign saved around ten thousand dollars for the UW in 2009, it does not give specifics beyond that number, and what makes the campaign’s capacity for change less convincing is that while living on my floor last year, I had not heard anything about the competition until the results were announced one day over the intercom.  Things simply did not change noticeably during or after the event.

Perhaps most frustrating is the amount of money that living in one of these rooms costs.  According to the UW website, average cost of room and board for fall 2009 was $8,040, which is a ridiculous $1,005 dollars for the approximate eight months of residence.  Living in an apartment this semester, I don’t even pay half that amount, even including utilities.  How does it make sense for a respectful student who cares about his environment and makes a point to use few resources to pay the same price as a student who is wasteful and uses the costs hidden from view to their full advantage?  The answer is that it simply does not make any sense, and the systems need to change.  As the movement towards sustainability gains force and is eventually realized as a necessity in order to keep ourselves simply alive, no exceptions should be made.  Sellery and Witte simply need to be updated; the old methods of ‘recycle a few cans here, toss a few boxes down the garbage chute there’ are not going to be acceptable in the near future, so attitudes must be changed now.  We need to stop being “cool;” stop trying to impress each other with ignorance.  I believe that we can be sustainably funny.

Since no method of observation can really be objective, I will conduct two separate types of studies to gather data and to get residents thinking about ways in which they could improve their environment, both globally and simply within their dormitories.  First, I will hand out the same questionnaires to residents going to eat at Gordon Commons from three separate residence halls: for Sellery because of its reputation as the party dorm, for Witte because of its similar but milder reputation compared with Sellery, and for Ogg because of its more modern conveniences and more efficient systems.  Second, I will take time to sit down with residents eating at the cafeteria and ask them several questions.  I want to make it more of a conversation than an interview in order to get the people engaged in the topic.  One problem I expect to face is rejection, which I will record in my data and move on.  I also expect some hostility, though I will attempt to remain as non-accusatory as possible during the talk.  I aim to obtain results from individuals seated by themselves as well as groups of friends to compare how people’s responses differ when they are in a group.

I realize that I am not trained in any type of research method or surveying technique, and do not expect to be able to submit my data to any type of scholarly association for publication, or use it as any sort of evidence for the argument for replacing the dorms with updated versions.  However, through this project I expect to at least get people thinking more about a topic which is not discussed nearly enough in popular media or in classes they may be taking.  Sustainability really is an important issue, and if I can get more people to become more comfortable talking about it, the world will be a better place.  Something harder to deal with will be issues of respecting environments, including people that are a part of them.  I will not make people change views on topics such as religion or politics with one conversation, but some people are so stuck to their ways of thinking that they make themselves blind to how far their actions can extend.  The most I can hope for with this project is to produce long-lasting positive changes in people’s attitudes to be the catalyst for larger system improvements, possibly replacing Sellery and Witte.

http://host.madison.com/daily-cardinal/news/residence-hall-energy-competition-to-take-place-throughout-february/article_94f5606e-9b55-54bc-acf7-f9df74830142.html

http://host.madison.com/wsj/news/local/education/on_campus/article_3ec19e94-4686-11e0-a350-001cc4c002e0.html

http://youngadults.about.com/od/healthandsafety/qt/suicide.htm

http://www.wisc.edu/about/facts/fees.php

http://www.housing.wisc.edu/sellery