BY TATIANA COZZARELLI

In print | Published February 22, 2007

It’s Saturday night. I am trying to go to bed early because I have a lot of work to do the next day. There are people screaming on my hall and someone bangs against my door. All of this is fine. I’m not angry. It’s Saturday night and people are having fun.

It’s not until Sunday morning when I get angry. I get in the shower and there are huge clumps of hair in the drains. I go down the stairs to brunch and there is trash littering the steps. The trashcans are flipped over with more trash spilling out of them.

Monday morning at 6 a.m., a woman who works for Environmental Services walks in to find the hall in disarray; her workload just doubled. This is not the first time this has happened. One hall I was on left cake all over our lounge: all over the furniture, the floor and on a table. Others have even left vomit on the floor all weekend until Environmental Services came by on Monday to clean it up.

Even though Environmental Services does clean the halls for us, there is no reason to leave halls in disarray. It is their job to vacuum and clean our bathrooms, not clean up our vomit and drunken messes or take large clumps of hair out of the shower.

Don’t get me wrong; I have no problem with partying and, clearly, I have no problem with people’s hair falling out in the shower. I realize that sometimes, drunk people fall down and knock things over. Sometimes drunk people vomit. However, I expect sober people to clean up the mess they made the night before. I expect people to clean their hair out of shower drains. Most importantly, I expect people to take responsibility for themselves and their own mess. This behavior implies a deep lack of consideration for others. I’m sure that most Swatties do not leave a mess out of malice; those who do not clean up their messes do so out of a lack of forethought, and yet that does not excuse it.

This situation is indicative of a general sense of entitlement that comes along with being in college; there is a sense that because we’re paying so much money to be here, this entire college is at our service. The underlying attitude is that we don’t need to take responsibility for our actions because at Swarthmore there are no consequences.

Our parents aren’t around to tell us to clean up after ourselves and, unlike almost every other living situation afterwards, we don’t have to live with the consequences of our own mess. We have people who clean the showers and the halls.

Our rooms are only temporary; it doesn’t matter if we damage the furniture. We don’t have to deal with the consequences of many actions we otherwise would have to deal with. However, there are consequences: someone else — most often Environmental Services technicians — has to clean up our mess.

If we pride ourselves in being a college that supports social justice, we should support social justice in our own dorm rooms. Supporting workers’ rights means more than taking a Political Science class, signing a petition or even calling our local congressperson.

It means creating an atmosphere in which is it easier to work, which includes cleaning up our own messes. It means respecting the people who work here enough to consider how our actions affect them.

So I’m asking you show a little respect. If you shed in the shower, pick up your hair. If you are drunk and knock over lots of things, clean it up, even if it’s the next day and you are sober. I don’t think that Swatties don’t clean things out of any conscious malice, but unconsciously leaving the mess is as offensive. We should think harder about things we take for granted.

Tatiana is a junior. You can reach her at tcozzar1@swarthmore.edu.

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