ResLife is at loggerheads with WestCo presidents surrounding the future of Zonker Harris Day, threatening to cut funding for the day’s events or even cancel the festivities altogether. This conflict comes on the heels of administrative actions to mainstream University culture, from the scaling down of Senior Cocktails to the construction of Usdan, a building that many students regard as sterile and lacking in character.

The University’s administration is taking—but it isn’t giving back. In exchange for MoCon and the old Davenport Campus Center, students received the Marketplace and a game room in the basement of Usdan. ResLife has not proposed an alternative to Zonker Harris Day. We would like to see the University offering more events that bring the student community together. One of the best, and most challenging, things about the University is its diversity. This might mean that students rarely find themselves at events with a majority of their peers. Everyone enjoys the all-campus barbeque that takes place the evening before classes start in the fall, and we would like to have more events like it.

We’re not suggesting that the administration pour money into bi-monthly bingo nights. The University should bring back Winter Carnival, a Spring Fling-like event that brought musicians to campus, and flood a part of Andrus field in the wintertime to create an outdoor ice-skating location. Or the administration could fund boat racing on the river—a pastime from the 1950s, in which groups of students designed their own boats and raced them when the weather got warm.

These events could become traditions, so that the few traditions that we do have don’t all revolve around drug culture. Removing drug references and drug activity from these events doesn’t mean taking away the quirkiness and off-beatness that probably attracted many of us to the University in the first place.

We see the administration trying to squelch the most exciting aspects of campus culture. And while we don’t want Old Wes to turn into Bucknell or Colgate, our culture shouldn’t be perceived as a bunch of students blazing in the naked dorm. We’re somewhere in between.