Off-campus parties and occupancy violations were up for discussion Tuesday at a forum in Seabury that brought together about 60 students, administrators, Evanston residents and elected officials.
It was the first in what Dean of Students Burgwell Howard said would be a series of quarterly talks.
The meeting came just a month after Howard sent an email admonishing students for holding wild parties off campus. The message found its way onto Gawker, where it won the university widespread — albeit snarky — attention.
Howard, who led the two-hour talk, said he wanted to close divides between students living off campus and their adult neighbors. “It shouldn’t matter whether your neighbor is 20 or 60,” he said. He urged student and adult residents to spend more time talking about issues like trash pickup and late-night noise.
According to Howard, the city has seen a spike in unruly student behavior in the past decade. He said students may move into apartments and find neighbors already angry about student conduct from past years. “And you wonder why your neighbor is on DEFCON 3,” he said.
Some adult Evanston residents said drunken students disrespected neighbors with noisy parties.
Resident Barbara Janes said that when she asked a group of students to quiet down one night, one replied, “Shut up, you ho.”
“That’s unacceptable behavior that should have been taught to them in the first 18 years of their lives,” Howard responded.
Medill junior and ASG spokesman Matt Bellassai pushed back against residents expressing negative opinions of students, saying that not all students support noisy off-campus parties.
A number of residents said they would like to see student drinking move from the neighborhood to campus. Howard agreed, but said university policy may be slow to change. “If I could snap my fingers and make a bar on campus, I’d do it,” he said.
Meanwhile, the City of Evanston has begun enforcing more heavily an ordinance prohibiting more than three unrelated people from living together in the same housing unit — a drawback for many student tenants and their landlords, who sometimes permit four or more people to live in an apartment.
But 5th Ward Alderman Delores Holmes said the city would immediately evict only students living in rooms deemed “dangerous,” such as those without windows. Other students living in over-occupied apartments, she said, would be able to negotiate later move-out dates.
She acknowledged that students, hoping to save money, often packed into apartments with the permission of landlords.
Both Evanston and the university officials said they are working on websites to publicize student tenant rights and give students advice on winning neighbors’ good favor. Betsi Burns, assistant dean of students, said the university will launch its site in the spring.
After the meeting, Howard said he thought the talk pushed students and Evanston residents to find common ground. But he acknowledged that the broader problems of off-campus student life — disruptive parties and crowded student apartments — were a long cry from being solved.
He was bullish about the university’s ability to make gradual headway, though. “How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time,” he said. “I’ve got my knife and fork ready.”