Jun 01 2007
End-of-year student detritus
From a CNN article:
With 1,700 students, Davidson College may be small. But you’d never know it when you see the stuff students leave behind at the end of the year.
In a large room at a fraternity house, stacks of clothing, furniture, lamps and electronics were already piling up days ahead of last Sunday’s graduation. Mixed in were odds and ends that could only wind up together in a college trash pile: a pair of giant Homer Simpson slippers; a collection of Pokemon cards; a batch of fashion disaster dresses you can only hope were costumes from a campus theme party called the Five Dollar Prom.
Boy, that took me back. When I was a college student in the early ’90s, I spent my summers working on campus. As a result, for three years I was witness to the aftermath of the campus exodus that most other students (having to vacate after finals) never truly saw. I was utterly gobsmacked that first summer, wandering through the mostly empty dorm I was to inhabit for three months and seeing all the crap that others left behind in rooms and hallways for the custodians to cart off to (presumably) the dump. It didn’t take us long to start scrounging around campus; the day or two after commencement proved to be best, and gangs of summer workers could be seen traipsing across campus with their hauls - one or two mini-refrigerators, various pieces of furniture and lighting, mixed tapes, unused notebooks, textbooks that could be sold to the local used bookstore for some extra pocket money, coffee mugs, sweatshirts and coats that looked barely used… you name it, you could probably find it somewhere on campus if you looked early and long enough.
I was pleased to see the email to campus folks this year that served as the yearly reminder of the Colby RESCUE (Recycle Everything, Save Colby’s Usable Excess!) program, created about a decade after our summer scavenging. While we students certainly found uses for some of the left-behinds, programs like RESCUE that gather the furniture, clothing, bedding, etc. and donate them to local charities put far more of the cast-offs to far better use.
