The summer after I started dancing again, I was diagnosed with Type 2 diabetes. So I danced more, joining the MSU Salsa Club and venturing out to other dancing events in the community and towns near Lansing. Today, I am asymptomatic and off medication, not to mention significantly healthier than I was three years ago.

I am a Spartan. Dancing helped connect me to the community on campus. I met and forged great friendships with people I met on or around the dance floor. We dance together, ride to events together, keep each other company, help with parking on game days and just hang out together. State Swing Society and MSU Salsa Club are a large part of my Spartan home.

Although both clubs are primarily composed of students and faculty, we also help with outreach. Our membership includes a few MSU alumni who stayed in Lansing, and we proudly represent our Spartan roots at events around Michigan and even beyond.

State Swing Society has been such a wonderful, positive influence on my experience at MSU and my life as a whole, but lately, it has been going through some rough transitions.

This fall, we were told to leave our traditional venue in the Gilchrist Hall Pub, and we are struggling to find a replacement that measures up to this wonderful space. We have been dancing in Gilchrist Hall for the past eight years, and in my time here, I have fallen in love with the elegant, welcoming room.

We have not been able to secure a permanent replacement that satisfies our ideal conditions. The room must be public and large so we can gather and dance together, open in the evenings — when our members are free — and have a wood or tile floor so there is not too much friction.

The abrupt nature of our eviction and the unsympathetic attitude I feel we have received from the MSU bureaucracy at large have left me feeling a bit betrayed by all of this. In a society struggling with an obesity epidemic, ought we not be doing all we can to encourage physical activity, rather than stifling it with a lack of support? If we no longer are welcome in the residence halls, for whatever reason, I would ask the MSU community as a whole to look into finding or making a place where the various student dancing organizations can continue to dance and try to regain our feeling of being a secure, welcome part of MSU.

I am a dancer, I am a Spartan and I feel hurt by this.

Kenny Barrese, mathematics doctoral student