New and unimproved: Senior Ball

By Nico Weiss

I am all for open discourse and orderly compromise, but there comes a point at which too many concessions simply make a discussion meaningless and leave nobody happy. I write not about the recent budget discussion in Washington D.C., but instead about the Senior Ball that ASG and the University just unveiled. Please excuse my willingness to complain about something that I am sure plenty of people have worked hard to attain, but there are certain aspects of the recent proposal that will undoubtedly ruin the experience.

For instance: the event will take place on the last Thursday of classes. This will effectively ensure that Friday morning classes are skipped — meaning that many of us will pay tribute to our time at Santa Clara by NOT attending the very last of our classes, and some of us will have to choose between the party and grade penalizations — cool. In addition, this year the event will not be held at a hotel, but will instead include a mandatory busing service to-and-from the event. This is not as much an affront to our freedoms as it would have been in high school, since we now have our own rooms to continue the festivities in, but it nonetheless dampens the "party all night" feel. To keep costs cheap, the event is just four miles away in San Jose, which makes the bus seem pointless and the event trivial. It really seems like we are just going out to the local bars, except that the cover charge is $50 a person, we aren't allowed to leave freely and the bars won't serve what some of us want to drink (we are only allowed beer and wine).

I'm not the biggest party animal by any stretch of the imagination — I still don't know the names of any of the party houses — but I am not opposed to parties in general.  What I am opposed to is ridiculous policies and wasting money.

All of these restrictions have been made in response to previous Senior Balls that really stunk. Apparently, the Balls of 2007 and 2008 amassed huge damages and got us kicked out of Monterey.

In an effort to save face, the University decided that last year there would be no Senior Ball and that this year, our Ball would be maimed in the ways described above. The problem with this solution is that it fails one of the most basic tests for proper punishment. If a man is found to have committed murder, we do not arrest his child because it might follow in his footsteps. We punish the offender — by charging the damages to those who committed them, for example — and inform everyone what the consequences are for violating the law.

But SCU is concerned about its reputation, so our administration finds itself in the unique position of calling graduates ‘adults,' but at the same time giving us the liberty of circus animals. Just like the safety department's insistence that the best way to get people to take fire alarms seriously is to have as many false alarms (or, as they call them, "drills") as possible, the policy doesn't make sense.  What bothers me most, however, is that the newspaper and administration are celebrating this colossal sham.  

The only other circumstance in which someone would have the audacity to charge us 50 bucks for a room to party in for a few hours would have to be  motel.

I will probably end up going to the Senior Ball because my friends want to go and because there is no real alternative end-of-the-year party.  

But, if somebody were to make their own party, it would undoubtedly be better than the Senior Ball. And, they should send everyone in the class an invite so that we could all have a proper celebration.

Nico Weiss is a senior philosophy and psychology double major.