The Collegian
Friday, March 29, 2024

No more Marsh madness

<p>Mold has displaced some Marsh Hall residents twice during this school year.&nbsp;</p>

Mold has displaced some Marsh Hall residents twice during this school year. 

At the dawn of freshman orientation week, a resident in Marsh Hall was watching football with his roommate. "Every time a good play happened, we heard a bunch of people cheering," Michael Marino said. The two wondered if their hallmates were watching the same game, so they wandered down the hallway to a lounge that had been converted into a quad.

Instead of finding a TV screen and a football game, they found a crowded golf course and a contest. The men in the room had made a course and ramps with chairs, desks and binders, Marino said.

Each player contributed $5 and took turns taking shots with the rule that the first to make the hole would win the money. Marino decided to join the festivities. He picked up a club and two shots later, he was $40 richer.

There was no alcohol involved, Marino said. "It was just golf in the middle of the day," he said.

So why then, at the start of the fall semester, were resident assistants of Marsh Hall dealing with negative reactions from peers when they said where they would be living there for the year?

The seven assistants are tired of the pessimism, one RA said. "These are responsible, mature young adults," he said. "They're not wild animals. Don't treat them like they're going to destroy everything."

One resident said, "For some reason it's had a reputation as being a very rowdy dorm...where a lot of the alcohol and weed infractions take place." This was his first impression of the building before moving in, he said.

Another resident said he had also heard Marsh was a party dorm before the semester started. "I took that with a grain of salt because I don't believe that there's anything, you know, coming from the walls that's going to make people who live there bad," he said.

But there have still been shenanigans, and a lot of the residents of Marsh do not reserve the weekends for partying. "It's honestly been every night," one resident said about the frequency of alcohol-related activities on his hall.

He described seeing drunken students traipsing through the dorm during freshman orientation week and ripping down exit signs. During orientation speeches, a policeman had to reiterate the rule against taking emergency signs down, he said.

The resident's home for the year is just one of the rooms in the four-story maze of hallways lined with green doors, many of which are studded with white message boards. "Kids will go by and they will rip the white boards off and keep collections in their rooms," he said.

But there has been no need yet for police involvement. "I've seen roaming RAs walking around, but that's it," the resident said.

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Behind the green doors are 221 freshman male residents. Behind the doors is where the action happens. The men mostly use their rooms for pre-gaming before they move to the apartments, South Court or Gray Court for actual parties, a few residents said.

One resident said, "Whenever it's a night to go out, everyone's drinking in their rooms."

Another resident said, "Sometimes it's a dude fest and other times it's coed. But mostly it's coed." A lot of the women come from Lora Robins Court, the freshman women's dorm on the other side of campus, he said.

One resident said, "It sounds bad, but the guys themselves are angels. It's the girls who are the bad influence." The nights when numerous female visitors are in the dorm are when the pranks are most noticeable, he said. Those nights bring higher noise levels, crowded hallways and more chaos, he said.

Another resident described a memorable night of partying. "It was Friday night after everyone came back from White Panda and the apartment parties," he said. "People came back in and everyone had their doors open, kind of chilling.

"And one guy - I don't know who it was - he went around and turned everybody's little heat thing up... so people were sweating and nobody had any idea why." The next morning, everyone was talking about their night sweats and realized that their thermostats had been tampered with, he said.

Aside from finding an "Anchorman" quote written on his door in permanent marker and hearing of a few cases of mysteriously broken beds and stray urination, there has yet to be any known serious incident of vandalism, the resident said.

In spite of the pranks, the resident said that most of the men he knew in the dorm did not mind their living environment, and that there were not many complaints.

"You see people walk in, and I like it," he said. "It's entertaining."

As a whole, the men of Marsh Hall have been respectful of the guidelines of residential life and its enforcers, several residents said.

One resident said: "The reputation has nothing to do with the building itself. It has to do with the residents and the resident assistants." He said he did not think the RAs were having difficulty maintaining order among the residents because of the goals involving community respect that were outlined during orientation.

The RAs have been having their fun, too. On Aug. 26, the RAs of Marsh Hall, in conjunction with the Career Development Center and the Center for Civic Engagement, put on a two-hour program for the dorm's residents, a resident said. Students stopped by for career and college building materials, as well as ice cream sandwiches and popsicles, he said.

After the event, the RAs loaded up a truck and drove around the dorm's exterior distributing the remaining ice cream sandwiches and blaring ice cream truck music, the resident said.

"The culture seems to have changed," he said.

Contact staff writer Katie Toussaint at katie.toussaint@richmond.edu

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