After a weekend marked by Northwestern student partying, Dean of Students Burgwell Howard sent an e-mail to off-campus students Thursday afternoon to ask for better behavior in hopes of mending relations with Evanston residents.
Howard’s e-mail included an excerpt of a message an Evanston resident sent to University officials detailing the student behavior last weekend, including urinating in an alley and “hollering about ‘bl** j*bs.'”
“Obviously urinating in public is unacceptable anywhere,” Howard said in an interview.
Many residents contacted city and University officials, Howard said. Although Howard said there were a number of factors leading to the weekend’s reports of student misbehavior, he said these issues were not unique to NU. Students have a very different schedule from Evanston residents, who sleep and rise early and often have young children, he said.
Students need “to adapt to the cycle of the community they’re living in,” Howard said, adding that excessive noise is disruptive to Evanston residents and a violation of city ordinances, which prohibit noise that can be heard more than 100 feet away past 10 p.m. on weekdays and 11 p.m. on weekends. Howard said despite efforts to the contrary, many students still do not understand the Evanston ordinances regarding noise and trash.
Ethan Merel, external relations chair for the Associated Student Government, said a mandatory off-campus orientation for new off-campus residents could help solve the problem.
Still, such measures may not fully address the problem, Merel said.
“Nothing can be done to directly affect childish actions college students do,” he said.
Off-campus resident Ben Zhu has a different view.
“I don’t think it’s fair to place the blame wholly on the students,” Zhu said.
Zhu and his roommates, who live in a house on Lincoln Street, have thrown two parties this year and a tailgate last Saturday.
Although one of the roommates provided a neighbor with contact information at the beginning of the school year, that neighbor called both the police and the landlord without contacting them this past weekend, the Weinberg senior said.
Still, several Evanston residents have said they are less likely to call the police on students with whom they’ve had face-to-face interactions, according to Merel.
“One-on-one communication seems to solve a lot of the problems that are currently being faced by off-campus students,” he said.
Howard and ASG President Claire Lew agreed the friction between off-campus students and non-student residents is not near the levels experienced by some other Big Ten campuses but stressed NU students are a part of Evanston as well as NU.
There are also consequences for parties, Howard said, and hosts can be liable for their guests’ actions.
“We don’t want students to have to go to a hospital or to court,” Howard said.
The Office of Student Affairs is having individual conversations with the houses that were cited for ordinance violations, he said, and some landlords planned to meet with tenants.
Despite the recent rash of incidents and a town-gown relationship that has always been troublesome in part due to off-campus students, Howard said there are currently no plans to expand on-campus housing.
“That’s one of the things people love about NU: having their own apartment, having their own independence, cooking their own meals,” Howard said.
Suite-style dorms such as Kemper provide an intermediate living situation between the freedom of off-campus living and the security of having utilities and other services taken care of by the University, Howard said.
“It would be in (NU’s) best interest to see if we could provide some (more) of those options,” he said.
Lew said the weekend incidents were “unfortunate,” but NU students are “responsible and conscientious” people.
“We care about the community,” she said, citing several projects such as ReNUvation by which NU students have volunteered and contributed to Evanston.
ASG and the administration are also planning meetings with ward residents and students in order to foster open communication. And while acknowledging the historical acrimony between NU and Evanston, Morel said, “You’ll be hard pressed to find among our peer institutions any student government that’s putting as much effort into repairing those relations as we are.”
On Lincoln Street, Zhu said he and his roommates are making efforts to be as courteous as possible.
“It’s a tough situation, and it’s not going to get better any time soon,” he said.
