According to the University Center and Student Activities, AU administrators abruptly ended On A Sensual Note's Mary Graydon Center Thursday performance because passers-by-turned-audience members disrupted traffic in the building and disturbed meetings upstairs.
But Student Activities' subsequent stop on musical groups' spontaneous performances prompts at least two questions in our minds. Perhaps, most obviously, how do a cappella groups take up any more or less space than the many homegrown political organizations that bombard students with fliers and pamphlets urging their support? On most days, one cannot enter or exit the first floor of MGC without being harassed at least once - not to say that some of us don't find sadistic joy in AU's overpoliticization.
And didn't AU spend the better half of this past summer remodeling MGC to create much needed space? AU should be more willing to share the results of its renovations to give MGC a desperately needed, community-based atmosphere.
The answer to our concerns invariably resides in Student Activities. As the article demonstrates, students are more than willing to negotiate space usage with the university. But doing so is often a strenuous process, riddled with unnecessary bureaucracy and inefficiency. In the end, it takes weeks to save a room for a meeting and considerably more time to rent a space for a performance.
But as much as we'd love to chide the university for denying On A Sensual Note and its a cappella brethren the chance to perform wherever they would like, we have to insist they subject themselves to the same tenuous bureaucracy we and the rest of the campus community endure. Still, tacit acceptance is no substitution for policy change. AU organizations should not remain silent on space concerns, and the university would certainly be remiss in ignoring them.
