This weekend, as many students take to the streets of Boston in costume, they will find that the availability of off-campus parties has taken a significant blow.
The city of Boston has effectively banned all parties at MIT’s frat houses this year with particular emphasis on Halloween. The move follows an incident in September in which a student partygoer fell four stories through a skylight after jumping on it. The student survived, but the incident has prompted city officials to seek new safety inspections for MIT’s fraternity and sorority houses. Until these inspections take place, parties at the facilities have been indefinitely banned.
While the reasoning behind the demand for inspections is sound, it does put a lot of blame on the property managers. Sure, the students will suffer by having their weekend activities restricted, but by subjecting the actual properties to inspection, the city has made it clear what it thinks the problem is.
Without question, a safe environment is important in any public situation involving alcohol. However, the well-being of an attendee cannot rest solely on the structural integrity of the building they happen to be in – there has to be some common sense involved.
To blame the incident on the fact that the student had access to the roof of the building only addresses a small part of the overall issue. It’s like somebody deliberately messing around by a window, falling out of it and then blaming the incident on the fact that windows were present. Some responsibility has to fall on students to make good decisions.
Jumping on a skylight was not a good decision and the student was lucky to walk away with his life and no serious injuries. He will move on, and the inspections will improve the safety standards of MIT’s frat houses for future generations of students to come.
That being said, this situation is yet another example of how much today’s society coddles bad decision-making and the shirking of personal responsibility. It’s always someone else’s fault. Nobody wants to claim any responsibility for his or her actions. There is always someone to sue. Accountability, it would seem, is a thing of the past.
Society then furthers this coddling by punishing those who exercise common sense like Erin Cox, the North Andover High School student who was punished for attempting to drive a drunken friend home from a party. For electing to help her friend and potentially saving a life she was rewarded with several demotions and volleyball game suspensions.
The North Andover school district has essentially said, “Go ahead and let your friends drive drunk. If they make it, great – if not, too bad.”
The administration had a prime opportunity to praise a student who exemplified a safety-first mentality. They could have put Cox on a pedestal and used her as an example of what to do should friends ever be in danger.
Instead they chose to criminalize it. A group of full-grown adults saw it better to punish an honors student for doing the right thing – all while toting their idiotic “zero-tolerance” policy.
Meanwhile in Boston, a student deliberately jumping up and down on a flimsy, rooftop skylight sparks a citywide inspection because students should never be exposed to such dangerous conditions. The situation is laughable at best.
Society as whole needs to seriously reevaluate its values. We are moving ever closer to a system in which individual well-being is all that matters. Anecdotes like the Erin Cox and MIT cases only serve to push people to ignore common sense and instead focus on what will yield the best result for them.
