Wespeak:
Regarding Our Private Gestapo

By Sarah-Jane Ripa

Mr. Goss, you are SO right. All of the students here at Wesleyan are mature adults. We all make good decisions; decisions which benefit us and our fellow students. We don’t need some damn force squad pushing into our social lives. Besides, all of the students here have astronomical I.Q.s. Doesn’t that tell President Bennet and his cronies that we are smart enough to make responsible decisions?

Oh wait ... we’re not. People who get drunk disturb the happiness of others just like they do everywhere else. Vomiting for no good reason and leaving refuse all over the campus is not responsible behavior. And I don’t think that the students who have already been treated for alcohol poisoning (yep, already a few this year!) made smart, or mature decisions.

By the way, drunk and disorderly adults, I mean ADULTS, get thrown into a paddywagon where I come from. Even better, most adults are allowed to die from alcohol poisoning, the victims of their own vices. The Wesleyan policy on drinking sucks, if you want to be treated as an adult. If you break the law in the real world, you pay the price. Do you really want to be treated like an adult, Adam? I don’t think you do, because in the real world the drinking age is twenty-one, you sly twenty-year old. In the real world when you can’t accept NOT drinking, you’re an alcoholic. It is only Wesleyan’s continuing negligible policy, that of treating us like spoiled brats, that allows students to continue drinking irresponsibly.

In the real world where real adults live, people are raped, abused, killed, and committing suicide everyday abusing alcohol the way the "adults" here at Wesleyan do. Does someone need to die here, too?

Ripa is a member of the class of 2002