Politics of dancing

By: Andrea Emery
News Editor

 On Oct. 20, a dry foam “dance” was hosted at the Science House located at 308 College Place.

According to Kiel Krause, a resident of the house, “it was a friend’s birthday, so we said that we would have a dry get-together and start up the foam machine. Word spread around campus and more people started showing up.”

Krause said he felt comfortable with the amount of people at the house because there was no alcohol, and he felt as if things were under control.

Krause continued, “I personally was the one upstairs watching the door and making sure that no one brought any alcohol into the house. I was making sure that people wiped off any excess foam from their body so that it didn’t spread around the house.”

Krause was then informed that security was monitoring the house.

“I wasn’t too concerned since we had a dry ‘dance’ and everyone living in the house is at least 22.” Krause assumed security would be more concerned with what he called more “troublesome” gatherings.

According to Krause’s housemate, Kurt Stuart, “I had been concerned with the possibility of a noise violation so I did a preliminary check with a decibel meter and at the side walk the dance measured 96dB and the air conditioning units for Bowers measure 100dB, which is a very noticeable increase. This leaves me wondering why Bowers isn’t constantly being raided for noise violations.”

Krause added, “Next thing I know, security is at the door and I open the door for them. I ask them what the problem was, they didn’t reply until they walked into the house. They told me that was an unregistered party going on at our house.”

Krause then said everyone was asked to gather on the main floor of the house. He added that security then searched the house and found one open beer bottle which Krause claims belonged to an of-age member of the house. Krause added that this particular resident had just opened the bottle and had no affiliation with the foam party.

Krause continued, “Security found this one beer bottle to be enough to warrant every underage student at the party a ticket. They asked those that were 21 to leave and they wrote down the names of those that were not of age.” According to Krause, security then told those students they were getting tickets for proximity to the alcohol, causing stress to students for the remainder of Homecoming weekend.

Underage students were given an incident report with security’s record of the evening.

“I read the incident report. I was appalled at the blatant lies security made in the report. There were NO beer bottles going down stairs, they never called the RA, the noise could hardly be heard more than five feet away from the house, and there was certainly not massive flooding of the basement.”

Krause ended with the following statement: “I found this report to be incredibly unprofessional, especially since I’m a former resident life staff member. If these are the reports that Student Affairs is basing their punishments off of, then I feel that Student Affairs should confirm these reports with the individuals involved or hire a new security staff that is more professional and can write a more legitimate assessment of a situation. I am glad that someone is finally asking those involved what actually happened.”