We all know the Saturday and Sunday morning routine. Wake up, assess the damage from your previous night of partying, throw on some sweats and slug your way into dhall for brunch. At a school with a thriving party culture, most students can definitely attest to the fact that this is the way the mornings tend to follow. But when I look around campus, I see more than smeared makeup and dirty shoes from the previous night. There’s much worse.

I leave my hall or my friends’ halls in the morning and see damages all over the dorms. Exit signs ripped off of the ceiling, bulletin boards scribbled with obscene jokes, and food trash left out to rot. When I leave the building, the grounds are littered with plastic water bottles, pizza boxes, sandwich wrappers, and abandoned shoes (for some odd reason). I can understand being inebriated and enjoying the night, but why do we have to destroy our campus on the way to and from parties?

When we leave our residence halls and the outside grounds trashed, all of our junk doesn’t magically get up and walk itself to the trashcan. We have a very hardworking staff responsible for keeping our campus beautiful, and by destroying it weekly we aren’t making their jobs any easier. If you were responsible for cleaning up campus after party night, you wouldn’t be so happy about what you see. When an exit sign is taken off of the wall, while everyone is laughing about it the next day, someone has to rewire it and put it back up there. When you sink your teeth into a delicious sandwich after a drunken night and leave the wrapper in a bush, someone has to pick it up and put it where it belongs. Our late night shenanigans that we adore so much do not end with us, many people are responsible for the messes that we make.

If this campus is our home for four years, why are we destroying it? Living here temporarily is not an excuse to treat it as such. Specific dorms have racked up nearly $3,000 in damages since move in day, setting a new record that they should certainly not be proud of. Truth be told, the way we behave here is absolutely not how we would behave in our own homes. No one would want to invite our friends or colleagues to a place with litter in every crevice. Knowing that someone will pick up after us certainly does not justify treating our campus with such little respect. At Richmond, we have incredible recycling efforts, countless trashcans at every corner, and many other means of cleaning up that we shouldn’t be taking for granted. The truth is, it isn’t hard to pick up after yourself.

I love my school, and I love my community. The University of Richmond is my home and I take pride in it. As a community, we are exceptionally academic and destined for success. Our students should make an effort to ensure that our campus is treated with the integrity that we are given from our professors and administrators. I believe that the cleanliness of our campus should reflect our undeniably intelligent student body, and we need to hold each other accountable for the drunken destructiveness that happens late on weekend nights.

Once we consider environmental friendliness, accountability, and mindfulness, I believe that as a student body we can begin to treat our campus with the respect and honor it deserves. All while still having a great weekend, of course.