The Cornell Daily Sun (https://cornellsun.com/tag/parties/)
The IFC president and the director of sorority and fraternity life sent an email lifting the ban on social events while implementing new measures for students’ healthy and safety.
People throw parties to have fun, but they require a detachment from each of our personal identities that makes the whole affair seem impersonal. Out on the dance floor and in the fraternity and sorority houses, everyone is looking out for themselves, only interested in making their night as memorable as possible. At a school as competitive as Cornell, I spend too much of my time battling the curve to have to fend for myself at a party full of strangers.
Those who disregard the measures Cornell has clearly laid out for us to succeed in returning to campus this fall put our whole community at risk, and should be sent away.
As advocates of a safer social scene for more than five years, Cayuga’s Watchers greatly appreciates the sentiment of Panhellenic President Maya Cutforth’s ’20 efforts to improve event safety. We were founded in 2012 at a similarly pivotal moment, in the wake of another senseless student death. Cayuga’s Watchers positioned itself as a uniquely student-driven response to an intractable national crisis — the normalization of high-risk alcohol use and insufficient safety measures at collegiate parties. Our goal has never been to stop partying, but to instead educate and promote safer behaviors throughout Cornell’s vast social scene, building partnerships and only ever showing up when we are invited. The mandates proposed by Cutforth would see trained employees of Cayuga’s Watchers required at every event hosted by a fraternity.
From Cornell’s earliest Halloweens to the present, revelers have used the occasion to both celebrate and wreak havoc.