It's another Halloween and another year of UB's administration pretending that students don't consistently make the less than 10-minute drive from South to North Campus drunk.
On Halloween night, students will put on their comic or skanky costumes in hopes of a good time, but instead of piling onto the UB Stampede, they'll get into their cars, knowing full well that the buses will stop running at 2 a.m.
Rest assured, UB will be sleeping tight, pretending no responsibility lies with them.
Extend bus runs until 4 a.m. on the weekends? Negotiate with NFTA to obtain metro passes for the student body with terms of a late-night bus service downtown the way Buffalo State College, Medaille and Canisius have? No way.
Instead they ignore the problem, while the University Police occasionally choose to make an example of some idiot pulling into the University Apartments trashed at 3 a.m. Meanwhile the rest of the drunk-driving population hurries home unscathed-for now.
UB is sweeping our lives under the rug just so they can pretend that their students are not drinking.
With two campuses three miles apart, one lined with bars and the other where the majority of students live, how could anyone pretend this isn't going on?
Heads up, UB: college students drink underage, overage, in bars, on streets, in backyards, in cars - and everybody knows it. You're not fooling anyone and since you shut down the on-campus pub long ago and made it your policy to hunt down students drinking in dorms, undergrads are likely to leave campus to booze it up.
When I was a freshman, bus drivers would volunteer to drive past 2 a.m., unpaid, to make sure students had a safe and enjoyable evening. Are these the only people that really care if students are driving home drunk?
Didn't anybody learn anything from abstinence-only sex education? Cutting off transportation at 2 a.m. isn't going to keep students from drinking any more than making condoms or birth control unattainable is going to stop students from screwing in full costume in an Ellicott laundry room while they wait impatiently for one of those 300-year-old elevators.
Granted, students need to take some responsibility for their personal safety. But with a subway line that stops at 12:30 a.m., a plethora of notoriously unreliable taxi cab companies and a main campus that is so far away from anything that it's impossible to walk or bike to, it's no surprise that we're looking for some direction from the same administration that seems to have no problem regulating each and every other move we make.
The only thing that's spooky about this Halloween is that UB doesn't care enough to provide late-night transportation; SA is too wrapped up in god-knows-what to provide supplemental transportation for the holiday, and the public transportation that is available to North Campus is largely unreliable.
Take my advice (because apparently nobody else cares what happens to you on Halloween or on any other night), if you don't want to get sloppy and go home with someone who lives in the Heights, plan on designating a driver you trust, because honestly I'm shocked and we should all be thankful that no one has died yet.
After years of UB controlling everything from how much food I should eat (meal plans) to the way I should spend my financial aid, I feel secure in the knowledge that when I finally look to UB administrators for protection and suggestions, all I get is an empty candy bag.
