Page 12
SILT shuts down Halloween
(CPS) Halloween, something
of an unofficial national student
holiday on many campuses, is
becoming an official student
holiday at one school this year.
Not all students, however, are
happy about ii
"They wanted to stop the
party," complained Ed Walthers,
chief of staff of the student
government at Southern Illinois
University (SIU) in Carbondale.
In what is probably the
nation's most extreme effort to
halt student Halloween parties
that often devolve into chaotic,
violent street brawls, SIU is
making all its students leave
campus from Friday, Oct. 26
through Tuesday, Oct. 30.
SIU will shut all its dorms
during the "holiday."
"We (the school's
administrators) have discussed
amid-semester break for years,
but the Halloween situation has
changed that," said Guyon.
The "situation" is the giant,
unofficial Halloweenparties that
SIU students -- soon joined by
students and then nonstudents
from all over the Midwest -- have
held annually since the mid
-19705.
As the years passed the party
became progressively more
Sponsored by Women Toda
and the Office of Student Activi
chaotic and turned into drunken
brawls. Injuries and property
destruction became common.
Despite the formation of a
Halloween Core Committee
to coordinate increased police
protection, street closings and
bans on glass bottles, in 1988
the celebration spun completely
out of control. More than 300
people were hospitalized with
facial lacerations caused by
broken bottles, one person was
stabbed and a woman was raped,
SIU officials reported.
Frustrated SIU and Carbondale
officials then announced% series
of measures to wind down the
party gradually, finally killing it
this year by driving most SIU
students out of town for the
weekend.
"The Student Senate is
opposed" to the forced holiday,
WaMa's said.
While Walthers thought the
break would be good for students'
studies, he thought the reasoning
behind the it flawed.
Moreover, Walthers asserted
some students who can't go home
will have no place to stay during
the break.
But SIU spokeswoman Sue
Davis said the school had not
1990-91 Film Series
The Collegian
heard any complaints from
students who had nowhere to
go. and that SIU would stick to
its plan to close all its single
student dormitories.
Married housing would remain
open, she added
"This decision to close was
made a long time ago," Davis
said, giving students plenty of
time to plan where to stay. "This
is not news."
While SlU's closing is the
most drastic effort to prevent
student Halloween parties, other
schools are trying other
measures.
In mid-September, city
officials in Boulder, Colo.,
announced a plan to make it so
hard for University of Colorado
students to get to the local
Halloween street party, held
annually since 1909, that they
won't try.
Previous efforts to make the
party, known as the "Mall
Crawl," safe generally have
failed.
Beefing up security and
changing the name to the
"Boulder Boo" in 1989 did not
prevent 40,000 people
from jamming into a three-block
area, climbing lampposts,
A Question Of Silence
Thursday, October 18,1990
7:30 p.m., Reed Lecture Hall
Directed by Marlene Gorris
A trio of women, all strangers to each other, meet in a boutique. When
one of them is caught shoplifting, they band together and kill the store
owner. A court-appointed psychiatrist is assigned to determine their
motivations and their sanity, and finds out a great deal about herself
and her own relationships in the process. Original, provocative, and
highly controversial, this was Dutch director Gorris' debut film in
1983.
Discussion immediately following, led by Dr. Diana Hume George,
Professor of English, and Penn State-Behrend student William
Goodman.
Winter Tan
Monday, October 22,1990
7:30 p.m., Reed Lecture Hall
Directed by Jackie Burroughs
A woman goes to Latin America and engages deliberately in
exploring the extemes of human behavior--both other people's and
her own. We travel with her through the country of her own mind
by means of her journal entries and close encounters with the
camera eye. What she finds out about her sexuality, her politics,
and her consciousness is difficult both for the character and for
viewers. The film received very limited distribution because it has
been called degrading to women--but both the main character and
the director declare themselves feminists.
Discussion immediately following, led by Ms. Maureen Finn,
Coordinator of Student Organizations and Program Development,
and Penn Eme-Behrend student Michelle McLaughlin.
breaking liquor bottles,
trampling lawns and starting
fights.
This year, city officials will
surround the area with roadblocks
and sobriety checkpoints to try to
dissuade people from going to the
mall.
Party bans have worked in the
past. When the annual Halloween
party at the University of
Massachusetts at Amherst
whirled into in a 1979 riot in
which students vandalized local
stores, UMass officials imposed a
five-year ban on Halloween
parties.
There have been no unusual
troubles at the smaller parties
that grew up at the school after
the ban.
Yet Halloween celebrations
have turned dangerous at other
campuses as well.
In 1985 at the University of
Illinois-Champaign campus,
windows were smashed, bonfires
were lit, fistfights erupted and
party-goers were showered with
glass from broken beer bottles.
A visiting Northwestern
University student wasstruck in
the head with a beer bottle, and
lapsed into a coma. He later had
to undergo brain surgery.
Thursday, October 18, 1990