From 2007 until 2009—the first few years of the administration of President Michael Roth ’78—the Wesleyan Student Assembly (WSA) and Wesleyan’s Fire Safety underwent an extensive saga, recorded in a string of articles written in The Argus. Students expressed their feelings using the paper’s opinion section, then called WeSpeak. In February 2009, Collin McMichael ’09 MA ’10 wrote about his grievances with Fire Safety.
“I would now like to point out that the one and only time that I have been fined by fire safety was my sophomore year,” McMichael wrote. “That year you took my fan and fined me $100. A fan! I believe you called it a ‘personal space heater.’… After you took my fan and fined me, I had to go through a four-month-long appeals process.”
Along with this criticism about miscommunication and fines, McMichael speaks in support of the WSA, calling for Fire Safety to halt inspections as WSA announced it would do.
In a similar vein, an anonymous WeSpeak post detailed the changes they wished to see in Fire Safety policy and procedure.
“[Fire Safety should] stop reporting drugs to the authorities,” the anonymous author wrote. “Rather than imposing massive fines for minor offenses that are insulting to students on financial aid, Fire Safety should drop the fines system altogether.”
The final WeSpeak post on this subject was written by Toni Latimer ’09, whose partner was turned in to the Middletown Police Department following a Fire Safety inspection for possession of drugs. The student posed some questions to Fire Safety in response.
“Why is your worthless department arbitrarily given limitless authority over students’ lives?” Latimer asked. “How can you possibly be acting in the interest of the University by ensuring a criminal record for a University Scholar with a 3.87 GPA, a compassionate, self-sacrificing person who could have been a fantastic politician?”
The passion expressed in these posts piqued my interest. What was so wrong with Fire Safety procedures? And how does it compare to today?
From 2007 to 2009, Fire Safety regulations were constantly changed. Then-WSA President Matt Ball ’08 remembers that students took issue with how abruptly the new Fire Safety policy was implemented. In an interview with The Argus, Ball theorized that the University realized it was behind its peer schools in fine collection and Fire Safety policy.
“It was a big risk, maybe for liability reasons but also for real public safety reasons,” Ball said. “The way the University went about it was to declare law where there wasn’t law, and [they] started enforcing the law when it had never been enforced before.”
The air around Fire Safety policy during this time was that students were socialized or educated to it, and therefore protested it.
“Students felt so powerless in this process, [so] what we pushed for was basically just student involvement,” Ball said.
Students felt especially powerless in the determination and collection of fines. According to an Argus article written in February 2007, the Fire Safety department had collected $40,700 in fines since Sept. 2, 2006. At the time, revenue from the fines was going toward a Fire Safety education fund, where the department would put on a demonstration of a model dorm getting set on fire. Students deemed these fines unnecessarily harsh, and WSA set out to change the system.
In response, the University instituted an official fines appeals process for the 2008-2009 school year. This founded the Housing Fines Appeals Board as a part of WSA, which consisted of three WSA members, one Physical Plant employee, and one Fire Safety official. This board reviewed, and either accepted or rejected, appeals to fines .
Interestingly, the Associate Director of Fire Safety at the time, Barbara Spalding, was against the formation of this committee, as she believed it would benefit students less than the appeals process already in place. In 2008, she spoke to The Argus on this subject.
“Right now, [Associate Director of Facilities Management] Jeff Miller and I just sort of use our own discretion in deciding appeals cases,” Spalding said, “With the committee, it’s going to have to be more black and white, in accordance with school regulations. So in actuality, it won’t be as good for the individual.”
Ball, however, pointed out the hypocrisy in this.
“[The department] instituted a very formal inspection system of policy and enforcement,” he wrote, “but they liked the ability to have full discretion over student fines.”
In addition to a more official appeals process, WSA pushed for a “seminar compromise” in order to reduce fines for students. This compromise was successfully rolled out in the 2007-2008 school year. The compromise allowed students to attend an hour of a Fire Safety education seminar in order to lessen their fines by $100. This compromise was still intact until this year, but with a few constraints: the fine was reduced by $50, and they could only be attended once per year.
“[Starting this year] all violations have been changed to points,” Manager of Fire Safety and Facilities Chris Cruz.
Because of this, fine amounts have been removed from the website. It makes sense, then, that Chair of the Fire Safety and Facilities Appeals Board Felice Li ’24 tells the Argus that there is no talk of monetary punishments in the board’s meetings.
“None of what we discussed is on fire safety violations,” Li said. “The fire safety things we are dealing with are when something actually got damaged, so that you have to buy a new one to replace. So the money is something that probably cannot be changed.”
Despite the lack of a fine, Lila Blaustein ’23, who recently received five points and is now on disciplinary probation following a Fire Safety check, still feels the Fire Safety process is too punitive.
“I would rather attend some sort of education than have the points,” Blaustein said. “And I think that would be a more responsible and progressive way for them to handle it…. We know that punishment causes anger and fear, as opposed to actually making me more conscious and thoughtful about my choices.”
In this way, the issues with fines that students had in 2007-2009 will most likely be the same issues students have with points today.
“My points are just gonna go away in April, so they are really just inconsequential other than as a warning,” Blaustein said.
In line with this theme, both Blaustein and Ball questioned whether Fire Safety actually changes people’s unsafe behavior. Ball told The Argus that, despite protests about student involvement in policymaking, many students felt ambivalent about Fire Safety.
“I think in part because… when [checks] happened they say, ‘Hey, take down your tapestry from the radiator’ and you would do that and maybe put it back up when they left,” Ball said.
Blaustein shared a similar sentiment.
“It’s like a nagging nuisance,” Blaustein said. “[I]t’s just like this chore of having to hide your stuff, and once you know you’ve been fire-checked, you take it all back out again.”
Blaustein regrets not hiding their stuff in time after being warned about checks in the class of 2023 group chat.
“That was my biggest mistake, honestly, in this whole enterprise, was I saw that, and I was like, ‘oh shit, I got to put my stuff away’ and then I forgot about it,” Blaustein said.
Although the fines system has been replaced with points, and the Appeals Board stays intact, some students still have a protesting attitude toward Fire Safety. Whether it is the fault of the students or the administration, Fire Safety policy at the University remains confusing for some students.
“Sometimes when the administration rolls out a new policy, there is no thought dedicated to socializing it with students and educating it with students,” Ball said. “Even if that policy is somewhat reasonable, I think especially at Wesleyan… people will react against whatever change you want to impose almost universally.”
Ella Spitz can be reached at espitz@wesleyan.edu.