Western Courier

Issue date: 10/21/09 Section: News

Dave Egler is a retired faculty member in Western's history department and has lived in Macomb for 35 years. Hank moreno/photo editor

Let me put it this way. There seems to be a lot of questions on the part of residents of the community and particularly those who are, like us, living in the northwest quadrant near the university.

Issues

It's a kind of culture clash. I would put it in those terms, whereby we, as residents, are living a life that is familiar to everybody. You come from homes like ours, from wherever you're from suburbs or wherever. And we live those lives and try to keep things as quiet as we can, to put out our garbage, doing the things that almost everyone does.

And looking around us, we see a lot of the renters certainly in our area who don't do those things.

There's certainly a lot of effort that's put forth to try to harmonize the two groups. For example, the university president has started a group called the Community University Partnership Project. It's put forth a lot of effort.

I sit on that group, and there's a lot of exchange of opinions, there's a lot of back-and-forth on issues, for example, relating to police enforcement and racial issues that pop up from time to time, and other things, for example, alcohol related issues or the regulation of alcohol-related issues.

And it's very likely that that particular group -C.U.P.P. organization - will generate some initiatives or policies that relate to students, and particularly when it comes to alcohol matters.

What students often complain about is not having enough to do in the town. This is a small town, a town of 10 thousand plus the university population. We don't have all of the various things so students tend to congregate in many fewer places than they might in well, maybe Champaign-Urbana or Madison, Wisconsin. They're much more concentrated than they are spread out. And the behavior, therefore, is sort of on display for the public in these fairly few areas. On the Square for example, or up and down Adams Street or Johnson Street or a few of the other main thoroughfares.

It's all kind of concentrated and that's where you find your bad behavior. And that gets out there and plants itself into the consciousness of a lot of people. To some extent, we keep having to remind ourselves that probably, let's say 90 percent of the student body are working hard over there, and doing exactly what they're supposed to be doing, and they're perfectly well-behaved. But 10 percent means that you have about a thousand kids who are not yet quite grown up enough or are not quite yet acculturated to a kind of community life. So that's where the friction takes place.

The town and gown are really both working at the same thing.

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