Author Archives: Joe Leedy

An Unpaid Opportunity to Respect Others

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It’s a beautiful Saturday morning here in one of the blander corners of New England. The sun is shining, we can finally see the grass again, Babson’s trees are looking fantastic, and I once again stumble into a community Go-Bike left outside leaning against a bike rack. My instinct, as the neighborhood bicycle hall-monitor, is to send a somewhat snarky email to one of my favorite list servs – once again not quite screaming, but recommending – into the void that is your collective Outlook inboxes. I mount the bicycle, point it towards East Hall, and start cruising. Wind blowing through my hair, I’m once again reminded how nice it is to ride a bike. When I return to my room though, my email-writing zeal is not where I left it. Instead, I’m left feeling something closer to reflection. The gist of which, as obvious as it may seem, is as follows: you don’t get anything for returning the bikes. Smug satisfaction is not a reward, nor is negotiating the often cluttered bike/ball room. And further, no one is going to get punished for not doing it; I’m not going to use my awesome detective skills to track you down and honor board you or otherwise scold your inaction.

As much as I would like to make this all about bikes, the issue at hand has nothing to do with them. How often do you think about how lucky we are to be here? Or more precisely, how astounding it is that we have as much latitude as we do? Take issue with admin all you want, I kvetch my heart out too, but don’t lose sight of how much faith and trust is endowed in us as a student body. 24-hour access to 3D printers, liquid nitrogen, a materials science lab, beautiful study spaces, a pool room, professional audio equipment, cameras, bikes, you name it. All with limited or zero oversight or restrictions. This is not inclusive of all the non-24-hour things we are trusted to use responsibly, and is certainly not an exhaustive list. The key word being: trusted. At the same time, it feels that year-over-year, this sense of community responsibility is eroded bit by bit. This is not the least bit speculative. For the second consecutive academic year, the shop has issued a lengthy email imploring more responsible use of the 3D printers. A trackable increase in emails sent by our wonderful library team points to a growingly ungovernable, irresponsible student body.

Most recently, it took the threat of an honor boarding for a lounge couch in East Hall to be returned. I won’t bore you with the numbers on missing bikes again. It’s easy to run this through the typical modern-times Olin student framework of redirecting the blame towards administration, which avoids the simpler explanation: that simply students lack respect for our communal resources. Nobody knows how to just ‘chill out’ anymore. Or perhaps we just can’t continue justifying paying for missing materials that would have been a blissful write-off in the “good old days” none of us personally experienced. In reality, though, it’s hard to deny that we have a role to play in all of this. It’s not in any way inconceivable that some of these open doors we all gleefully tell prospective students about will be under lock and key by the time we graduate. 

Trust is not something we are inherently endowed or owed. I am well aware that sincerity is uncool, and that what I am about to say is somehow even less cool than that, but do you remember that document we all signed during orientation? As jaded as you might feel, I would suggest that it does, at some level, mean something.

Toilet Reading

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In light of the Eagles’ recent ‘huge dub’ at the Super Bowl, I present to you, dear Frankly Speaking reader, a hacky allegory: I grew up in Philadelphia, and there’s a certain reputation our city has for sports hooliganism. Some may say it represents a larger city-wide ethos of sorts, others find it annoying—take your pick. There is a Philadelphian habit of climbing poles during major sports-related events in Center City. So much so that the PPD regularly greases the poles in anticipation of any such event. However, as the NFC championship game loomed, no such poles were greased. The implicit message being: “please don’t misbehave… because we asked you to.” This approach certainly has its merits, but on that very same day, an eighteen-year-old Temple University student fell to his death climbing a pole near City Hall. This is in no way to say that this tragedy could have in some way been avoided by a greasy pole, but does speak to the extent to which asking people to modify their habits for the greater good has its limits. 

I might add here that I, being a complete ‘woosie’ with a limited interest in professional sports, do not climb poles. The presence or absence of grease on a pole does not compel me one way or the other. As someone who already has a lifetime subscription to the tendencies of risk aversion, someone telling me not to climb a pole and someone making it hard for me to are indistinguishable. For those Philadelphians or visitors living out the image of a die-hard Eagles fan though, the behavior may as well be instinctual—it is part and parcel what you do in Center City when the Eagles play, win or lose—that, or cheering it on.

This idea of behavior modification came to me once again when visiting a Milas Hall bathroom and glancing upon the sustainability-green flusher on the toilet, complete with usage instructions printed above. For those unacquainted, a traditional downwards push on the lever uses a higher volume flush, and an upwards pull uses less water, for liquid waste. Let’s say, for example, that you don’t like to read stuff. You go to the bathroom, turn around, and push the lever the way you’re conditioned to do by years upon years of bathroom usage, regardless of what you’ve left in the toilet. Does this mean the lean green handle doesn’t work? Certainly not; there is simply a mismatch between the desired behavior change and the underlying behavior. Different example: you do like reading, but even having parsed the instructions behind the flusher, you just push it down like you’re used to. It saves water, sure, but for a large institution you don’t balance the books for, and you’re in a rush. Now, of course, we shouldn’t need an incentive to do something that’s ‘good’ and ‘green’–we should all have a vested interest in conservation of resources and what is good for the planet. But, as I think we can all attest to on some level, that’s not an attitude ‘we’ truly all share, or ‘we’ truly act on at all moments in our lives. 

‘We’ should of course not wring our hands and self-flagellate over this, but perhaps we can take the time to think about how these interventions might be re-designed. In this silly example of the toilet, what if the ‘default’ behavior saved water, and the ‘alternative’ behavior expended more? For our undesirable behaviors, would it not make more sense to make the behavior more challenging to continue, rather than say ‘please don’t do that’?