I recently appealed a dorm damage incident that occurred in the men’s bathroom of my floor while I was off campus. When I attempted to appeal the charge, which was divided among all residents of my floor, I received the following reply: “ ... It is standard that the building covers the dorm damage, when individual responsible [sic] is unidentifiable. It is not a perfect system but common throughout this campus and among most campuses. We will gladly grant our appeal if you could provide us with the name of the person responsible.”

If, as the Dorm Damage Appeal Board suggests, it is indeed impossible to determine responsibility or absolve any parties of blame, why are they charging only one floor? By the same logic under which they charge both sexes for damage to one single-sex bathroom, the culprit might have been from any floor. For that matter, why confine the charge to a single dorm? By accident of housing I, like many students, since my freshman year have been paying for dorm damage I didn’t cause. This does not foster a sense of communal responsibility. Instead, it generates apathy in those responsible and annoyance in the vast majority who had nothing to do with it. As for turning in fellow students, even when we do know, it would hardly be in the spirit of Amherst College to do anything more than urge them to come forward. The Dorm Damage system is deeply flawed, and hardly improved by inconsistent willingness to assign responsibility at the level of floor or residence hall, but not of the individual.

We need to change our campus approach to dorm damage. Either it doesn’t matter, in which case costs should be spread across the entire campus, or it does, in which case the administration and RCs must make a more diligent effort to determine who is actually responsible and charge accordingly.