The new house on the block

I live in the newly renovated Munford House a.k.a. “Young Munny” a.k.a. “Beta Gamma Omichron” (BΓO). The numerous nicknames we’ve invented for our beloved house, as well as the fact that we made shirts celebrating Munford at the end of last year, provide a sense of how excited everyone is to be involved in it. Thanks to our successful Superblock application, the Comparative Music house was born. I’m living in a brand-new house with 24 of my closest friends, all of whom are committed to carrying out our house’s theme and spending the allotted funds in productive ways to that end.
Munford residents, I can tell you, love their music: while working, partying and even showering, music of all genres abounds in this house. Already, several Mojo sessions have resulted in significant music sharing among my housemates (just got the new Nelly song from a friend –– score). Not only that, but I’ve been serenaded by the angelic voices of the Dissipated Eight, and there are occasionally several guitarists kicking around on the patio.
All jokes aside, Munford has some serious plans to throw events consistent with the Comparative music theme — we’ve talked about wine & cheese open mic nights on Thursdays and casual Friday afternoon jam sessions on our patio (complete with grilling). The College is granting us a major privilege in allocating money for our house to host events, and we’d like to earn the respect that the administration is preemptively giving us. As a new house on campus, I’d love to see us add to the social fabric of life in “the bubble” by offering some fun musical events for all occasions.
To that end, some of our house members have carefully learned the rules and protocol involved with having registered events, and we attempted to throw our first registered party last Friday. Due to some logistical problems, our party host ended up purchasing 30-racks instead of the kegs we’d initially registered (which he cleared with a Public Safety officer over the phone). Nevertheless, that proved to be the start of our problems, as the cans greatly irked the Public Safe officer who came by our house at 9 p.m. to check things out. After meticulously inspecting the goings-on of the party prep and reviewing the rules for distributing the alcohol, the officer left, and people started showing up.
It was not yet 12 a.m. when Public Safety came calling again and quickly began dolling out citations, which resulted in the party being shut down. Despite the fact that we had three house members checking people at the door, and despite the fact that the party was by no means out of control, our first event ended before the day was done. As it appears the College would like to promote the Middlebury social scene through the Superblock houses, I have a hard time reconciling this party’s untimely closure with that mission –– it felt like we did our best to follow the rules and ended up going to bed early for our troubles.
It would be extremely beneficial for the health and safety of both campus social life as well as the students throwing and/or attending these parties if Public Safety could be seen as working with, rather than against, the party hosts. We all have the same goals –– a fun, successful and safe night –– and the perceived hostility of Public Safety seems to be detrimental to this end. It sends a message that registered parties will definitely face Public Safety scrutiny, whereas unregistered events have a better chance of surviving for longer. We’re new to the process, we tried to follow the rules, and it would be great if in the future Public Safety could treat our events with more courtesy.