Iowa State: Breaking the Residence Rules System. Really.

College life is about stretching rules and getting away with whatever you can–especially when you’re fighting real stupidity. The best way to do it–gum up the works.

So in the old days, Iowa State was divided into social units called ‘houses’–these functioned like fraternities, except you didn’t pay thousands of dollars, didn’t get to exclude people based on their income, drug/drinking ability, or their skin color. Houses threw parties, hosted social functions, the works. The old residence hall system was unbelievably awesome—and that’s not sentimentality at work. They are now basically dorms and there’s nothing really done to maintain coherent social lives, no bonds created to carry through the decades. In this case, change and evolution have not happened for the better.

So we were (and remain) Foster House. Foster was considered ‘academic housing’ so we were supposed to all be studious and wanting a quiet environment. Yeah. Sure. The system screwed up and put a group of guys together that were the equivalent of Hogan and his Heroes, Tom Cruise’s Mission Impossible team, or the gang from Ocean’s 11. Humor me–we were that awesome.

One of the rules of the house-system was that each floor had to have a constitution. The constitution could contain whatever you wanted or needed as long as it had certain things covered–dues for social events (you didn’t have to pay–but then couldn’t participate), quiet hours for weekdays and weekends, how disputes between floor members or roommates should be resolved. All the things you’d expect. Ours had those, too.

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BOOM–subject switch. Iowa State’s student government was the Government of the Student Body (GSB). In the late 80s, it was a silly group. The leadership was more intent on dramatic symbolic gestures instead of its primary duty–allocating funds to student organizations (now they use buzzwords like ’empowerment’ and ‘advocacy’). In one instance, the GSB leadership handcuffed themselves to the building where the CIA was interviewing students as prospective employees and smeared cow blood on themselves and the building. Really. They would protest having ROTC programs on campus.

One of their silly ideas was that they were going to debate a resolution, vote on it in late Fall, and have it go into effect spring. The resolution? That the student body was united in opposing anything taking place on campus which could be used in the creation, maintenance, etc of the American nuclear arsenal. Basically Iowa State’s campus would become a nuclear-free zone.

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Back to Foster. Constitutions were required to be complete and ratified by the governing residence association by the end of September (for us, this was the Union Drive Association, known primarily for Friley Hall). We were a diverse group of guys, but none of us really liked being preached at or having decisions made for us–especially useless ones like declaring campus a nuke-free zone…which at Iowa State was just ignorantly dumb since the campus had a functioning atomic reactor and played a role in the Manhattan Project.

We reached some logical conclusions. If student government could declare the college to be nuke-free, then student governments (us) had the right to declare us pro-nuclear. Amiright? Of course. Better still, if we put that in our constitution, we’d already have had it endorsed by the UDA. The UDA student government always voted to approve constitutions, so once ours was approved, we’d automatically have support of 1/3 of campus.

You see, just like GSB’s leadership was ideological, residence hall leadership was basically lazy, using the positions as resume-fodder. The UDA gov’t was supposed to read each constitution and then the UDA council was supposed to vote on each constitution. The catch–there were 40-50 constitutions, so they never read them and they were ALWAYS approved by unanimous voice vote. Perfect.

And so it came to pass in the fall of 1987 that Foster House created its constitution with a clause endorsing deterrence and offering our House as a repository for nuclear weapons if necessary and as the government saw fit. From there, it went to the UDA where it was passed unanimously.

The pity–the GSB never did pass their crazy-stupid resolution.

But why it becomes an amusing memory for me–after our constitution passed, Iowa State’s Residence Hall policies changed. Houses still had constitutions, but they could ONLY include certain items. They became fill-in-the-blank documents, nothing more. We broke the system.

That’s important. Never give up poking the system when it is stupid or injust. People with power will inevitably try and use it in ways it was not meant to be used, try and expand that power. Fight them. Daily.