To the Editor:
Upon reading The Mirror online last week, I was very disappointed to see that 200 Nights has been canceled.
I attended 200 Nights last year, and it is true that there were a few things that went wrong with the evening. However, I do not regret attending 200 Nights. In fact, I enjoyed it.
In last week’s article, Mark Reed was quoted as saying that “The event, as I understand it, became an excuse to consume excessive amounts of alcohol, often with few controls in place.”
There was a major control in place: the fact that there were only two bars for all in attendance. From the outside, the event could have seemed focused on drinking, because it took upwards of 20 minutes to get a drink, so it looked like students were just on line for the bar all night. As a result, many students ordered two drinks at a time to avoid the wait.
I do not believe that the vast majority of students were more intoxicated than they would have been on a normal Friday night. Those of us who were drinking were of legal drinking age.
Just as there tends to be that person who drinks a little too much at any event, there were those individuals at 200 Nights. But this is no reason to make the rest of the class of 2005 look bad or punish future classes.
I urge the senior class council to push for some event for the entire senior class. Besides senior week, there are very few times when the entire class is together, and I think that with a few changes, a night like 200 Nights could serve as the perfect event for the senior class to unite and have some fun.
A common concern at Fairfield is the extreme student apathy. If students keep getting taken away from them reasons to unite and celebrate then they are only going to become more disinterested in their school. Events like 200 Nights and Mock Wedding, as childish as they may appear on the surface, serve to form a bond between classmates. And with that bond comes pride in their university.
It has been said before when events were cancelled that they were not “Fairfield traditions” because they had only been around for a few years. However, each tradition has to start somewhere, and if no events are allowed to survive for more than a handful of years, then Fairfield is never going to have any lasting traditions.
Sincerely, Ashleigh Egan Class of 2005 Mirror Managing Editor emeritus
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