Dear Campus Fire Safety,
Of all the Man’s bureaucracies, it is hard to imagine that Fire Safety would be caught up in childish competition with “peer schools.” Is your goal really to out-fine Williams? Will it impress US News and World Report if Wesleyan can be more paranoid about spontaneous combustion than the billion-dollar schools?
For that matter, the exorbitant fines you impose don’t have any rational basis. For many Wesleyan students I know, parents will just pay the fine and it will be of no consequence (or deterrence) to the student. For students without such a privileged position, myself included, several hundred dollars for innocent “violations” can mean a 10% hike in tuition. And one thing’s for sure: financial aid certainly doesn’t pay for our wall decorations’ apparently fiery aspirations. Fining our fine coffee-brewing, cup-a-soup making students has no effect but irritation on those who easily afford it, and it’s a brutal slap in the face to those who are not so financially well off.
“Safety”?! What is “safety”? Should we all put out our incense because the bricks might catch fire? Or are the tapestries going to suddenly fall off the wall onto the incense and burn us up that way? If my coffeemaker is on for more than two hours, will the room light up? I’m not suggesting we all get a fireplace and mantle, but extreme paranoia over day-to-day activities is simply unhealthy. Next we’ll be spraying Foss Hill with fire-retardant to save us from perilous cigarette butts.
Oh, wait. You really will need to spray Foss Hill with chemicals before the big dorm-burn. What with bitter letters like this one and all, there simply isn’t a better use of this year’s record $40,000 harvest of injustice. The money that you say you’ve collected works out to $14 per student, a possibly distorted figure that hardly seems believable when I think of all my two-hundred-fifty-dollar friends. And is burning down a model dorm REALLY the best you could come up with? No, really? Was it?
We all know that Fire Safety exists primarily to fulfill the semiannual privacy violation of room inspections that we are all forced into by the required, non-negotiable housing contract. Does Wesleyan keep this draconian institution because of a thirst for money to burn up in a disturbingly ominous dormitory hellfire? Or is it kept so Wesleyan can keep calling the Police when they discover as they did this past month that a Wesleyan student—God forbid—has been stashing a few grams of one of the world’s great evils: marijuana. When the police come, maybe you’ll be able to uproot this scourge of drug users and evildoers. After all, most of campus is subject to Connecticut’s absurd two-year mandatory minimum sentence for the unscrupulous ones among us that dare to have a bag of pot in the desk drawer.
Enjoy the bacchanalian feast we all know you’re having down at Fire Safety. Maybe my best friend’s candles will provide the perfect soothing light as you sip that $100 bottle of champagne I recently bought for you.
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