Thursday, March 28, 2024

All people should attend U events

I am writing in response to a State News article (“Groups seek to limit attendance,” SN 11/1). I think it is a very bad idea to limit parties and activities to MSU students only. This is extremely unfair to the MSU students such as myself whose close friends attend other universities and enjoy visiting and attending MSU events.

My friends have never caused any problem at any party, but yet they are punished because a few acted irresponsibly. I attended the Fake the Funk after-party last year, which had at least 1,000 people in attendance, most of whom were non-MSU students. Even though there was an extremely large crowd and a large amount of non-MSU students, there was not one incident that I know of.

So, with that said, I don’t believe that admitting non-MSU students will increase incidents. I think the organizations that proposed this are on the wrong track. What I see as the problem is admitting non-college students. I think the people who cause problems at these events are most likely locals who do not attend MSU and other people that travel from different cities that are not necessarily college students. I think college students in a whole do not cause trouble and start fights at parties and other events. It is those few locals and non-college students who come to parties to cause trouble.

I propose MSU only admit college students with their ID, and non-MSU students, as many as two per MSU student, have to be signed in, and that an MSU student is responsible for his or her guest’s actions, similar to when you sign someone in to a dorm after midnight. The University of Michigan also has a similar policy for its on campus parties. This will sharply cut into incidents without punishing MSU students and their friends from attending MSU events.

One last problem I see, that was addressed by the organization’s proposal, is that of overcrowding outside events. If you don’t let a steady flow of people into an event, the crowd will grow larger and it will naturally get restless, and sometimes angry. I have seen it many times where this happens, and it is the reason a lot of incidents do occur.

When parties are canceled because of overcrowding in the line outside of an event sometimes people get angry, especially those who drove a long way to get there. It leaves people with nothing to do, such as the night written about in the article in which hundreds of people gathered in Spartan Village.

If the black groups and students on campus could roam the streets freely hopping from fraternity chapter to fraternity chapter like other groups on campus, maybe things like this would not happen. The bottom line is people need things to do to keep them occupied and out of trouble and that’s all that particular incident showed.

Michael Harris
packaging senior

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