Whitmanites butcher pigs outside Hargadon Hall.
Hamentashen offensive continues as Princeton Committee on Palestine seizes the Center for Jewish Life.
Freshman runs around campus with AK-47. (Wait, that was real, never mind.)
Minus the rare exceptions, these events and others like them would hopefully and realistically never occur on our campus. Princeton is a quiet place. There’s not that much instability or cause for panic. Sometimes, this incredible calm can make life here a bit boring. But I’d take boredom and stability over danger and excitement any day. Call me old-fashioned, but I like the idea of a campus community where my fellow peers aren’t left entirely up to their own devices. And that’s why I took special issue with Dylan Shinzaki ’12’s column last week, in which he argued that the University should condone irresponsible behavior and let its students be “stupid.”
At first read, I couldn’t take Shinzaki’s point seriously. His repeated references to various drugs reminded me of an immature child seeing Harold and Kumar for the first time and distracted me from his primary argument. In fact, online comments seemed divided on whether to attack the column for its loony musings or praise it for its brilliant, subtle parody. But Shinzaki’s humor, enjoyable as it is, seems itself an unconscious subversion for the absurdity of his argument. I will give him the benefit of my considerable doubt that even at his column’s most asinine points, he still remains committed to an earnest appeal on the part of Princeton’s craziest thrill seekers.
I suppose, then, that Shinzaki wasn’t joking when he wrote that “[w]e need stupidly dangerous rituals like walking on roofs, stealing the clapper, running naked in the snow and binge drinking in order to weed out the people who drag us down as a species.”
The idea of weeding out people who drag us down as a species, all jokes aside, is just a bit offensive. There is an entire history of brutality specific to this distorted ideology Shinzaki has just rehashed. I don’t know about Shinzaki, but I always thought it was a fundamental part of being human to care for the safety and well being of our fellow man.
And even if it were OK to weed out the worst — the ones who drag us down — I don’t think you would find them on our campus.
The other major tenet of Shinzaki’s column, which deserves a strong and resounding rebuke, lies in his confidence that Princeton students should be able to act as they please without safety rules. Shinzaki wants to run on the roofs.
“Basically any activity you could do on the lawn is about 10 times more fun when done on the roof,” he wrote. I don’t think that letting Princeton’s thrill seekers run laps on the roof is a risk. But there is a serious reason we don’t have access to the roofs of Princeton buildings.
Princeton is a stressful place, and there is a history of psychotic behavior among students. University safety policies aren’t only in place to protect the clumsy. If the reporting in the ‘Prince’ last November on psychiatric care and the prevalence of depression at Princeton is any indication, Nassau Hall has to be aware that suicide is a major risk on this campus. Shinzaki makes roof access a laughing matter, but the prospect of a Princeton suicide is not, however horrifying, inconceivable. Ultimately, there’s no preventing stupid behavior if being stupid is an active and dedicated pursuit. Yet the University must do all it can to make sure it isn’t an unwilling accessory to student stupidity — and if that comes at the cost of restricted roof access, so be it.
I find Shinzaki’s dream of a Princeton governed by his worldview repugnant to mine and I hope almost everybody else’s. Last Friday, Steven Shonts ’12 brought a disabled gun onto campus and created a serious safety risk for himself and an imagined one to everyone else. Shonts’ boneheaded decision reminds us all that even if we were smart enough to get into Princeton, we can still be stupid — sufficiently stupid, in fact, to get kicked out.
It’s not like Shonts was acting out Shinzaki’s orders. But I believe that the events of last week are the strongest indication that not only are Princeton students capable of being stupid, but we also have a serious need to be protected against that stupidity.
Peter Zakin is a freshman from New York. He can be reached at pzakin@princeton.edu.
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