The decision to overturn the ban on Eclectic this week was surrounded by a fog of speculative details, many of which remain obscure or unconfirmed. Among them: the identity of the person who issued the original noise complaint, whether or not Eclectic had been using university funds to sponsor private events, and what exactly caused the ban to be overturned after the Student Judicial Board had already made what seemed like a carefully considered decision.

Not only were these details left unclear—the administration and the SJB failed to present them to the student body in a direct and timely manner. Although the decision to ban concerts at Eclectic for the rest of the year was made on March 2, this decision was never communicated directly to the student body, who was affected by the decision as much if not more than the members of Eclectic. It was only after the decision was overturned by Roth that the information was written about on his blog.

As Roth himself noted in his blog post, Eclectic has long been an important part of the social life on Wesleyan’s campus, and the lack of alternative concert venues here has made it the main source of attraction for bringing in popular bands. Although the new campus center has added the Fayerweather building to its list of potential performance sites, still it does not compare to Eclectic’s ability to accommodate large numbers of sweaty, dancing bodies.

It is a problem that remains, for the most part, overlooked by the administration, and the span of time in which it seemed like Wesleyan had lost Eclectic as a concert venue served to highlight this issue. No doubt the students who visited Roth during his office hours this week to petition for an appeal of the ban emphasized the fact that, with Eclectic gone, many of the music opportunities for not only Eclectic members but for all the musicians on the Wesleyan campus would be severely restricted for lack of resources.

So we applaud Roth for his decision to overturn the ban, but we also think that the events that preceded them should have been stated in a clearer way to the general Wesleyan public through means other than, say, a blog post. When he was first approached with the appeal to overturn the ban, Roth said that he “didn’t want to tread on the toes of the SJB” or “seem like a king” by making an executive decision that conflicted with their interests. Considering the magnitude of the effect that Roth and the SJB’s decisions have on the culture of Wesleyan’s student body, they had a definite obligation to give us the real facts about what happened.