Opinions

On invincibility

In print | September 10, 2009

By now, many of the details of Haverford College’s unfortunate weekend are likely familiar to most of the Tri-Co community. For those still in the dark, a quick recap: Pennsylvania State Police officers, dressed as college students, gained entry to Haverford’s “Lloyd Around the World” party last Thursday night and proceeded to cite 31 Haverford and Bryn Mawr students for underage drinking. The officers had found out about the party thanks to an anonymous tip, as well as the occasion’s Facebook event, which was left open for all to see and contained the phrase “drink your sorrows away.”

Following the raid, Haverford President Dr. Stephen G. Emerson said, “Part of growing up is to learn how things actually work in the real world.” Clearly, some Haverford and Bryn Mawr students got quite the crash course in the way the “real world” treats underage drinking differs from how the issue is dealt with on any of the Tri-Co campuses. From our vantage point here at Swarthmore College, the incident is a cautionary tale for us also.

But last weekend, Swarthmore operated with essentially business as usual. Perhaps even Haverford’s tribulations are too far removed from us to take seriously. Calling Swarthmore a bubble is almost beyond cliché at this point; nevertheless, with regards to these recent developments, there seems to be the prevailing attitude that not even the State Police can burst our protective shield. So allow Karen Tidmarsh, Dean of the Undergraduate College at Bryn Mawr, to clarify some lingering points.

In an e-mail sent out to Bryn Mawr’s undergraduate students, Dean Tidmarsh noted, “Both state and local police are within their rights to come onto campuses and to enter buildings if they have received complaints or otherwise have reasonable cause to do so.” More ominously, “The officer in charge of the raid at Haverford noted that the state police intend to move from campus to campus in this area to try to intervene and educate these communities about the legal consequences they face for offenses such as underage drinking.” Our collective apathy towards the police raid speaks volumes about the false sense of invincibility that being who we are at this particular point in time — especially at Swarthmore College — affords us.

We live in an era where professional basketball players provide live game updates on Twitter at halftime and barely remembered classmates from a decade ago can learn all about us by reading the info section on our Facebook profile. And on campus the information overload is magnified with flyers indiscriminately posted on lampposts and bulletin boards alike, without regard to who might be reading. The intention of these sentences is not to induce paranoia; it is to raise the question of just why our natural instinct is to find such worrying unnecessary.

Freely giving away information is simply asking for unwanted trouble. Recall that the State Police garnered most of their probable cause for raiding the party from the Facebook event, left open for the public to read. Such an oversight is just another variation of a situation where an event is made known to several friends, who freely mention forbidden words like “alcohol” and “marijuana” to several other friends, until the boys in blue come knocking at the door. Suddenly, the notion that, “Well, it could never happen to us at Swarthmore” becomes irrelevant when the time comes that it is happening right now.

Prudence, then, is the name of the game, if we hope to continue enjoying the relatively great freedoms granted us at this college. More importantly, close reflection on just how carelessly we are wont to give away information in a time where there are ever-more mediums in which to do so is imperative for navigating a brave new world where the cops too are on Facebook.

Because even if we’d like to think we are, especially on this campus, we are not invincible. And that seems like a ridiculously obvious statement. But there is no denying that we — not only as students but as a generation — carry a sense of complacency in what we choose to reveal to others, knowingly or unknowingly. Re-evaluating our premises will show that, even for a Swarthmore student, a little caution goes a long way.