More About Rides On Campus

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Originally, the whole idea of offering rides on campus was for the safety of those who wanted/needed an escort to a particular place on campus. It was initially implemented for single females who had no one to walk with them, specifically at night. With time, this idea was expanded to include anyone, male or female, who wanted safe passage around campus at night. Today, however, it has become a chauffeur service for anyone, at any time, and for any reason to travel around campus. Please don't get me wrong. I do not say that it is not a necessary service, because it is. The problem lies with the purposes and intent for using this service. In my opinion, it is terribly abused by most--but not all--who call for the service. There should be some limitations or parameters for it since it has been used for shopping, laundry service, coffee runs, and--most of all--rides to the nearest alcohol establishment. The biggest abusers call for constantly repeated rides on a given night to and from either a friend's dorm or to a place closest to a bar and back. I do mean REPEATEDLY! It also would not be so bad if in fact that most of those living on campus are Freshmen, and are therefore under-aged when it comes to going to a bar. Most people would not even know that these same children drink to such excess that they require medical attention from alcohol intoxication. When that happens, and security is called to assist, it's not only a trip to a hospital. It also means a visit by the local police who have to charge them with underage drinking. This in turn can go on their records. This also infers that the security service who transported them in the first place could be held responsible to some extent, since they provided the transportation in the first place. For an academic institution to allow this without allowing security to check I.D.'s and driver's licenses for age can pose a problem overall. By the way: the smell coming from the back seat is mostly alcoholic and gut wrenching, so we know what they were doing. Cars are regularly equipped with garbage bags now, just in "case of emergency". If drinking to excess is apparently the adult thing to do, I'd like to know where they learned about it. They turn from Dr. Jekyll into Mr. or Miss Hyde in just a few short hours, on a weekly basis. The problem with such alcohol use, or abuse in most cases, is that it also creates an air of entitlement from those who partake in the rider service. While it is true that they pay for the service, it does not give them the right to treat security personnel with vulgar disrespect and continual verbal abuse, either. Complaints about the service center upon slow response times and claims of rudeness from the security drivers. It does not matter to them in the least that there are hundreds of calls per night for "rides" all over campus and to bars. They expect immediate response and subservient "courtesy" no matter what the situation--even if there may be an emergency on campus. The cat calls and degrading verbiage are sometimes beyond belief! These are Freshmen...the "new elite" of the future. Academia does not seem to care in the least either, as long as the adult wannabees get what they want. Security is nothing more than a necessary evil to them, which has now been reduced to a common chauffeur service of a substance-hungry bunch of children. This is the future of America? My theory about this current generation of college-level children is that they are the original soccer-mom children who have been spoiled to death, given everything they wanted, and driven around from one place to another with little, if any, discipline. Thus they have come to EXPECT to be treated like royalty, and everyone else have become subservient to their whims. The attitude is just appalling! If anyone thinks that their children are really safe, they better think again. They are only safe to the extent that academia will allow its security to do what they were originally trained and intended to be: crime prevention officers, not chauffeurs and babysitters.