“When we hurt our mother, we hurt ourselves.” If the images of empty beer cans and cigarette butts littering the sidewalks to class don’t make you cringe then maybe this is a sentiment you have not experienced. But those that treat the Eckerd College campus as not only our school but our home, are troubled by the constant presence of glass, pub cups and various alcoholic beverage containers strewn along our otherwise beautiful campus.
Art major Katie Austin explored this sensation of sorrow that comes with walking through a dirty and disrespected campus in her senior thesis project, “Disrespect Me,” in which she welcomed students to mistreat her in the same manner they abuse our campus. Austin provided a “disrespect me checklist” that included heinous acts students have committed against the campus and were obliged to do to her including “write on me,” “pour beer on me,” and the most obscene, “urinate on me.”
No, she is not a masochist. The project stems from the idea that campus is our home, an environment for us to grow, love and learn– not mistreat. She hoped to make the people on campus aware of their everyday actions and see if they would change their attitudes and actions if they were asked to commit the same acts upon Katie. Most students probably don’t think of campus as a “womb,” but disrespecting our campus is like disrespecting our mother, says Austin.
The goal of the project was not for Austin to get urinated on, rather to evoke the concept that Eckerd is not only our party headquarters or where we study; it’s our home. She wishes to delve past the cliché idea that we should treat the campus like we treat our house, a concept that seems to be lost on those who light their common room couches on fire. Still, Austin promotes the notion that if “we cherish our relationship with our mother, Eckerd, we will, in turn, be better nurtured,” an idea that takes our recently implemented “RespECt” campaign to another level. Student Lilah Greenberg commented, “It really makes you think about the way you treat Eckerd, and campuses and environments in general, and how hurtful it can be.”
Some students that attended were not as receptive to the concept. As one student stated “ the wild college kids in most colleges have and will continue to wreak havoc, and they will continue to graduate, and they will not even notice whether their school is ‘nurturing’ them or not.” Others believed that spitting or urinating on the campus was not a serious offense, one student so eloquently stating, “if I spit on a sidewalk…I don’t think mother Eckerd should slap me across the face….”
The personification of our actions against Eckerd made those that attended the thesis conscious of their actions on campus. If only a few were receptive to the concept of Austin’s thesis, at the very least the project opened up conversation on how they treated their campus, their nest, their home.