WTRA wants us to give them $1 a month; lots of questions, though

I got this "friendly" e-mail from UCLA Housing Services yesterday asking me to vote yes to fund WTRA's budget.

Dear x

Weyburn Terrace Residents' Association (WTRA) was started in 2007 and has been working to become a basis for an active community at Weyburn Terrace. WTRA organized the resource fair, picnic, and movie at the start of the school year, organized trips to the Getty Museum, cosponsored a picnic with International Graduate Student Association, and organized a movie and Grad Bar at the end of the school year. Most recently, WTRA sponsored a happy hour.

WTRA also provides a communication pathway between residents and UCLA Housing. Among projects under consideration is the installation of drink and snack vending machines on a trial basis and the ability for residents to access other courts with their keycards in the near future.

In order for WTRA to continue to sponsor events and provide residents a voice inside Housing Management, WTRA is asking for your support in contributing $1 per month per resident, which will be taken out of your rent and put toward a WTRA budget. The residents' association at University Apartments South assesses a $5 per month fee for each resident, but WTRA currently receives no money from Weyburn Terrace residents. For its first two years, WTRA was given grants from various UCLA groups, but these grants will not be renewed for the upcoming school year. Without dues of $1 per month, WTRA cannot ensure its continued existence. These dues would begin with the contract for the 2009-10 school year. Even if you will not be living in Weyburn Terrace next school year, we still need your input on this matter.

Please respond by completing this one question survey by Friday, November 21.

Click here to take this survey.

There is a link to a simple survey, which you could easily click on over and over again (I know; I voted twice).
This is the screen you see after you finish voting:

It is completely insecure.

People bitching about noise over listservs

This pissy e-mail from Ming Chieh Tsing, a Weyburn student, on Sunday launched several e-mail threads:
stop the loud partying all night!! Some have to study this is not community
college.

if you want to party go to bar, there are plenty in westwood!!!


For your reading pleasure, here are some of the other responses, all snarky, and funny:


Zachary Beyer Gaber, the same wad who wrote a verbose e-mail regarding Housing's "can't do" attitude, tried to offer Ming (the whiner) advice on handling noise:

Hello Ming,
Sorry you're having troubles. Weyburn Terrace does have a policy of
quiet hours, after 10:00pm I believe, for exactly this reason. I
think the best approach is just to knock on the door and tell the loud
people to keep it down. Or if you're shy, tack a note onto the little
message clip by the door the next day. I think most people would
respond favorably and will try to keep it down. I'd rather not
escalate this to reporting them to Housing until after you've tried
communicating with your loud residents. Calling in the authorities
shouldn't be the first response in a community. However, if this is
really being a problem for you, has been happening a lot, you know who
the offenders are, and especially if they don't respond to your
contacting them, then you do have the option of asking Housing to
intervene. Housing can issue official warnings or even impose
penalties.

Zachary

Alex Milsom was offended by Ming's blithe chastening of the partiers in Weyburn as community college students:

Ming,

Your highly justifiable complaint betrays quite an opprobrious class-based
prejudice: that those who attend community college spend their nights
partying. You have every right to complain about noise in the building, but
it is inappropriate to insult those who may have attended community college
in the process.

In my experience, in fact, you are more likely to find all-night partying at
four-year schools - yes, even at ones as illustrious as UCLA - than at
community colleges which tend to attract commuting students (if you look at
the demographics).

Best,
Alex.



Mark D. Sugi even busted out with some research:
I

n fact, a recent study looking at the National Longitudinal Study of
Adolescent Health found that males that attend four-year universities are
more likely to commit property crimes than their non-college-attending
peers. That study is complemented by those that show evidence of increased
binge drinking and rates of human papilloma virus seroconversion in college
women as high as 60% over 5 years. There is a reason why people look back on
college and say it was the best time of their lives. On the flip side,
four-year university programs like ours produce tremendously talented and
highly-educated workers. The important point here, then, is that we
communicate in a civilized manner if there is a problem and involve Housing
only if it cannot be reasonably resolved.
http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/07/31/college-students-behaving-badly/?apage=2
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/reprint/308/5722/618.pdf


And then Paul McReynolds wrote this e-mail. Evidently, he was paid a visit by a police officer because Ming called in the cops on the noise;


I agree.

As one of the people who has apparently been part of the problem, I am very
sorry to whoever my friends and I disturbed this weekend. But please,
please, next time there's a problem just come by and let me know. I'd much
rather talk to my neighbors than a particularly abusive police officer, and
I'll be just as quick to correct the issue.

A lot of the time we have a choice between treating each other as strangers
or as neighbors—many of us are both. I second Mark's and Zachary's
suggestion that we try direct communication first and fall back on authority
only when that fails.

In my case, I'm very sorry that I bothered my neighbors this weekend, and I
won't do it again. At the same time I'm angry that the first time I knew we
were causing a problem was when the police started banging on my door. We
can be better neighbors than that.

- Paul

And then, after reading ALLL of these e-mails, Ming illustrated that he still didn't get it!

thank you. i will be calling police and housing next time this is every week
nonstop!! these people are unstoppable.

Hello there!

If you found your way here, it is because you are probably also a graduate student at UCLA or you think you want to be a graduate student at UCLA but you just aren't sure. I promise to keep this light, fluffy, and easy on the snark. But you know that is going to be easier said than done. I'm a second year Weyburn Terrace resident, and I'm committed to making The 'Burn (as our newsletter is called) a better place to live. And don't let the innocuous aesthetic of this blog fool you: I've got some whistleblowing tactics up my sleeve.

With love,

Weyburn Terrace