Join the campaign to "Change ND"
Robert Pazornik
senior
I've been at this school long enough to realize the sad, sad truth that the Golden Dome stands for one thing and one thing alone. And it's not Our Lady of the Lake.
It's cash.
Cold hard cash. Alumni checks with six zeroes, endowment figures with eight digits, big dollar signs and bigger piles of that precious, precious monetary fuel that buys stadiums and dormitories, Notre Dame monogram waffle irons and Stanford head coaches.
Notre Dame guidelines for student life revolve around wealth, and the latest policy revisions by Father Poorman are sadly no exception.
Is the issue at hand preservation of community, student safety or some other admirable cause? Father Poorman sat down at his computer Monday night and lied to us all. He drafted a masterfully woven blanket of rhetoric — a page right out of some Clintonian public relations spin cycle so fiendishly fashioned, so cleverly crafted, that one might actually be led to believe that the interests of the Notre Dame student body were the sole inspiration for the its conception.
But the truth is dirtier. Much dirtier. Father Poorman didn't need to write a statement Monday night. He barely needed to draft a page in order to express the true incentive for this plan. In fact, he should have only needed a single word:
Liability.
Plain and simple. If an underage student dies from over-consumption on school grounds, the Golden Dome is liable. Father Poorman has to sit in front of a grand jury and sheepishly explain that he is, and for quite some time has been, fully aware that underage students are imbibing massive quantities of powerful intoxicants on this campus. And what happens when the frailties of our ambiguous drinking policies are exposed? The Golden Dome pays through the golden nose, and some poor parents of an expired student get a sheepskin parchment and a check for $90 million as a macabre souvenir of duLac's worst nightmare.
But if said underage drinker dies with a drained bottle of Goldschlager in hand at College Park or Castle Point or on the sticky mauve tiles of Boat Club's dance floor, the University is not liable. Do not pass go, do not pay $90 million and Father Poorman proceeds directly to his mahogany desk in the president's office. Much better.
Is there a good chance that more students will perish from overdrinking off-campus than on? Yes. Is there a good chance that the Notre Dame community will drastically deteriorate upon the death of SYR's and traditional hall dances? Absolutely. Is any of this relevant to liability? Hardly.
Risk management. They teach us this stuff in school, right? If I were Father Poorman, maybe I'd do the same thing because people in high places aren't stupid. They're actually very smart, and if they have to bend the truth once in awhile for public policy purposes, who's to be the wiser? We're only students.
But that's not what should worry us most. It shouldn't bother any one of us that someone we trust, a member of our own Notre Dame family, may have in some small or not so small measure, sought to mislead his flock in any way, shape or form.
What should bother us most is that Father Poorman could care less what any one of us thinks in the first place.
And maybe that's not even the worst thing — maybe we should be more concerned that Father Poorman (and whoever pulls the golden strings above him) doesn't really even care what our student body government thinks either. Father Poorman didn't even bother to allow our student representatives any input concerning a drastic policy change that ultimately transforms the Notre Dame community as we know it.
So what now? What are we supposed to do?
Do we rally? No — no one will listen.
Do we chain ourselves to radiators? No — no one will care.
Do we pour malt liquor on the steps of Main Building? No — no one in Main Building likes malt liquor. And saving the right to consume malt liquor on campus isn't even the point.
The point is that, we, the students, have no voice in a place that wouldn't exist without us. And the way to speak when you have no voice is to learn the only language your adversary understands. At Notre Dame, that language happens to be cash.
This is a formal call to all seniors, juniors, sophomores, freshmen, graduate students, faculty and alumni who care about the Notre Dame community to promise to withhold all future monetary donations to this University until serious policy changes are enacted to provide students here with a real voice. Students need meaningful representation with meaningful power, and until such a power is realized, the Notre Dame community will continue to suffer a tragic, albeit silent, injustice.
A group is being organized among campus upperclassmen known as "Change ND." The group will be asking all Notre Dame students to sign individual pledges not to donate any personal funds to Notre Dame until drastic steps are taken to ensure that student voices will be fairly and adequately represented in the future.
The pages of The Observer will be littered for weeks with rants, raves and assorted gibberish — like this letter, for example. There will be angry words and cynical expressions; there will be good points made. But at the end of the day, the paper you hold in your hands will be thrown away.
Don't let this issue die quietly like so many other scarlet crimes the administration has coyly passed beneath our noses for years and years. Take this one out of The Observer and into your halls. When you see a "Change ND" pledge, sign it. Post it on your door and a tape a copy to Father Poorman's office window. Tell your parents, tell your friends. E-mail your local alumni clubs and let them know how strongly you feel about this.
Change is long overdue, and we badly deserve it. Today we have the opportunity to fight for something meaningful and something central to every academic and moral value this place of learning — our home — represents. Raise your fists and lower your wallet. Here come the Irish.
Robert Pazornik
senior
off-campus
March 20, 2002
All Viewpoint Stories for Thursday, March 21, 2002
