The effects of CSB+SJU on campus living during COVID

Going to college after one of the weirdest semesters of high school that possibly any senior has ever had due to COVID was quite the change.

I knew that CSB+SJU was debating going entirely virtual for the fall semester of 2020, and they decided to have students on campus for that semester. I think that decision has greatly hurt this campus for the past four years and the foreseeable future.

Most first-year students come to college expecting freedom and to have all these cool things going on around them for the next four years of their life. While we did get freedom, the opportunities were not there. You honestly couldn’t do much on campus outside of the time you had in class, as many of the clubs met online and the socializing was cut down significantly in order to keep contacts down.

But college students are not going to sit in their rooms on Zoom groups all day; that just doesn’t work.

So, where did these bored students go? Either they would drive home to be with their families and hometown friends on the weekends, or they would go into the city, where there were no COVID restrictions on what they could and couldn’t do.

Most of these places that students hung out at were the bars and houses of upperclassmen. This led to a huge influx of students going into St. Joe on the weekends, regardless of whether they were 21, as getting a realistic fake ID to go into town was very easy and not that expensive either.

I believe this shift in what students at CSB+SJU thought was the only thing to do can still be seen now, with many of the underclassmen spending their weekend nights at the various establishments in St. Joe. (As someone who was an underclassman at one point, they are not hard to point out and decipher from those who are of age.) It has also almost seemed like the number of underclassmen attending the different bars in St. Joe has increased compared to 2020. So, why do I blame the school for this? In 2020, when my class entered college and didn’t have anything to do but go to the bars, we created a culture that has seemed to stick with the other classes coming into college after ours.

While I’m sure the school couldn’t have entirely seen this coming, they had to somewhat expect it, as no college student will just sit around in their rooms or only go hang out with one other person at a time, as the restrictions for COVID stated that only one guest per person in the dorm/apartment was allowed at a time.

While the institutions could’ve seen this coming, there really was no way of knowing how much it would shift the campus culture for the years following COVID.

As new waves of first-years came in and looked to the upperclassmen to see what to do, they would really only see those students going into town to party at the bars on the weekends; that is the only thing people had done before, so that’s all they knew.

I shouldn’t just sit here and bring up these problems without bringing up a solution. How do you get students to come back to campus and stop going to the bars? It’s quite simple: let students do things on campus.

Yes, it is illegal for someone under 21 to drink alcohol, but that clearly hasn’t stopped many students from consuming it. So, bring back events that keep people on campus. Bring back apartment parties that are allowed by the school (and actually allow them; don’t just say you do and then, when people propose gatherings and follow all the rules, shut them down).

Bring back Pinestock and other musical events on campus. Allow students to perform more at Bro Willie’s on the weekends and weekdays. Have more events where you feed students for free, and don’t just feed them bean burgers and other foods that don’t ever get eaten; listen to their input and feed them what they want.

By doing these things, you can show that students can still be on campus and have fun, and they can practice moderation by stopping at buzzed. Some of the best stories that Johnnie alumni have told me is about their days sledding on reef trays in the arboretum with their friends or some of the parties that they would host in the earth homes that are now New Seton.

Overall, we can’t change the past, but we can learn from it. What I ask the school to do is to understand that no matter what they do and say, if they don’t start allowing the upperclassmen to have these events on campus, the underclassmen will just see them go to the bars with all the other students and think that’s all people do here on the weekends.

By making these changes, I believe we can start to change the culture toward people being on campus more and not just going into town on the weekends.