There are many sights Wesleyan students expect to see over WesFest weekend: the nervously excited grins of visiting pre-frosh, fellow undergrads lounging in the newly green grass, those red and black balloons the administration only seems to drag out when visitors show up on campus.
But another, more dispiriting display has become equally associated with the weekend’s festivities. Looking out at our beloved Foss Hill after the student body enjoys an afternoon of rest and relaxation on its gentle slopes, we find its normally vibrant green tainted by the garish silver of aluminum cans and the harsh glint of empty bottles. One can only guess what prospective students must have thought, walking past piles of trash while visiting a school whose student body prides itself on environmental consciousness.
We understand that picking up empty chip bags and beverage containers is not the most enticing way to end an afternoon sunbathing on Foss. However, there’s also no reason why this much-loved part of campus should be littered with student trash simply because we don’t feel like walking to a garbage can. Foss Hill is too valuable a campus landmark, meeting place and general source of campus goodwill to become the unofficial University dump.
At the same time, there’s no reason why there should not be more easily accessible trash receptacles and recycling bins along the top of Foss Hill. A couple of cans would not reduce the Hill’s aesthetic quality. And even if they did, is it not better than a Foss Hill blanketed in refuse?
The plethora of garbage and recyclable cans around Davenport provide an ideal model for increased receptacles at Foss. Students will often eat their lunch on the grassy patches around the Campus Center, but accessible facilities keep litter to a minimum. By giving these options to students, it may provide the extra incentive we all need to take a moment and deposit our trash.
Foss Hill should be a place where students go to escape their academic and personal stresses and bask in everything good about this campus. Let’s not have to maneuver around discarded beer cans and yesterday’s newspaper to enjoy it.
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