Archived Edition: October 17, 2007 | Back to Current	Jul 31, 2010

Fecal cleanups continue
Amanda Korman - Executive Editor

Talk about the cusp of a trend: the term “bio-cleanup” does not appear in the Oxford English Dictionary or Wikipedia, and yet it has been at the tip of administrators’ and custodians’ tongues since the beginning of the school year. The term refers to any custodial cleanup of vomit, urine or fecal matter on College property, particularly in common or residential areas. As of Sunday, an unprecedented 24 bio-cleanups have been performed on campus, a trend many find disconcerting.

Since Thursday, custodians found five incidents of vomit outside of toilets, as well as a broken urinal and a damaged bathroom mirror, in the Paresky Center. The weekend before, custodians found excrement smeared across the interior of a stall in the second men’s bathroom in the Log. This incident brings the number of excrement-related bio-cleanups to six for the semester, including similar smearing occurrences in Williams Hall and Spencer House.

Administrators believe that these events indicate an unacceptable level of disrespect for campus spaces, one that has been creeping its way into the College community since students’ arrival on campus in August.

Bea Miles, director of Facilities, expressed her growing concern with the situation. “We have never seen the frequency we’ve had since school started this year,” she said. “The custodial staff is being very much abused on campus this year, for the first time ever in my tenure.”

Doug Schiazza, director of Campus Life echoed these sentiments, going as far as to question students’ levels of “human decency.” “For people doing it deliberately, there’s no excuse for it,” he said. “They need to be held accountable.”

Miles also identified concerns regarding the malicious nature of the attacks on school property. “The spreading of excrement is obviously deliberate. It’s not like someone had an accident,” she said.

While the perpetrators of the bio-cleanup incidents are all but impossible to identify retroactively, administrators and staffers believe likelihood that the consumption of alcohol encourages these occurrences is high. “It never happens during the day, and it’s usually late at night when it does,” Miles said. “It certainly indicates a direct result of drinking.”

Baxter Fellows have taken steps to decrease bio-cleanups in their dorms, the expenses for which are currently charged to the house. When a custodian in Perry informed George Carstocea ’10, the house’s Baxter Fellow, that someone had urinated in a trash can in the main hall, he contacted his residents to explain that their house budget – $300 for the year – would be used to pay for the cleanup if no one came forward. According to Carstocea, the loss of these funds will likely result in the elimination of house snacks for two months.

Carstocea said he doubted that Perry residents were responsible for this incident and pointed to students’ ability to circulate between all residential buildings as a problem related to this. This freedom is not afforded at many other schools and is one that comes with the understanding that non-residents may enter the house and disrespect the space, Carstocea said.

The Dean’s Office, the Office of Campus Life, the Committee on Undergraduate Life (CUL) and the neighborhoods have been in discussions regarding the necessary policy changes for alleviating this growing problem. Many administrators agree that it is generally impossible to identify culprits, who would, if caught, shoulder the burden of bio-cleanup costs. Therefore, the question of what group or persons should be paying has lingers. There is currently no timetable for when a bio-cleanup payment policy shift will be communicated to students.

Administrators acknowledge that finalizing a strategy is taking a considerable amount of time. “The number and kinds of incidents are propelling us toward setting up specific policies so that students know what the consequences are if they engage in that behavior,” Dean Merrill said.

On their own, the neighborhoods are also working on campus-wide respect campaigns aimed at fostering good relations between custodians and students by putting a face to the people who have recently dealt with bio-cleanups. Another proposal they made but have since dropped suggested that for every bio-cleanup on campus, students would have to do community service hours.

Miles noted that because the bio-cleanup incidents have occurred all over the campus, the inability to target the problem’s source heightens the frustrations related to the issue. “These have been in every neighborhood in every kind of building,” Miles said. “I can’t say that there’s a pattern, because it’s been all over campus, which in some ways is more disturbing.”

This evening’s College Council meeting will be an all-campus forum led by Merrill to discuss these issues in Hopkins 1964 Classroom at 7:30 p.m.