Letters: Alspaugh is still the same

Reading Professor Cook-Deagan's guest commentary, "To Alspaugh, with Love" Monday, I was saddened to hear that old Alspaugh hasn't improved much in two years.

The list of the selfish acts its residents have committed this year kicked up some of my own memories from freshman year--writing covering the second floor walls, vomit flooding the guest bathroom downstairs and broken glass scattered in front of the Fac-in-Res' door all come to mind. Could you imagine walking over to your neighbors house and covering his front yard with a handful of tiny glass shards, knowing several small children lived there? Just another example of how a few careless people managed to ruin a perfectly good dorm.

I wish that this small-mindedness were confined to just Alspaugh. However, I'd bet every college student in America could rattle off half a dozen Alspaughisms committed in their own dorms. Okay, maybe we were an extreme case, but after talking to students at Duke and elsewhere it is clear that this stupidity goes on in dorms all around the country. Is this supposed to be one of those inevitable college experiences, indulging in childish disregard for the people that live and work around you?

Faculties-in-residence are here because they absolutely love teaching and want to be around students all the time, not so they can mop up vomit and run fire drills in the middle of the night. It just doesn't seem right that, because they choose to dedicate so much to teaching, they have to put up with, in some cases, the most selfish behavior imaginable. However, clearly it's not the majority of students doing this. During my freshman year I learned to respect and admire the people I lived with in Alspaugh, and I am confident that now it's still just a few ignorant people ruining it for the rest.