The area around Wake Forest University still has some islands of beauty.
The community around WFU still has some islands of beauty.
Sunday, April 12, 2009
Monday, April 6, 2009
A Letter to President Hatch from area homeowners
March 15, 2009
Nathan O. Hatch, President
Wake Forest University
P. O. Box 7226
Winston-Salem, NC 27109
Dear President Hatch:
When I wrote my first letter to you in October of 2007, I felt hopeful that a President who clearly intended to lead Wake Forest University toward a fuller realization of its potential for greatness, and committed to elevating its motto of Pro Humanitate, would never be content to allow a neighborhood just outside its gates to experience a continuation of conditions that deprive its residents of the peaceable enjoyment of their own homes, when these conditions are the result of a growing number of Wake Forest students residing in our midst. They are now notably present on almost every street in our neighborhood, and our conditions have grown worse. But I am not yet ready to abandon my hopes.
I attempted to explain our neighborhood conditions in general terms, but perhaps an historian might find specific examples more telling. In my earlier letter I mentioned a former UANA president, a decorated combat veteran who had faced enemy fire in Vietnam, had returned home and lived happily for years on Harmon Drive, and for a time kept his composure while dealing with the gradual encroachment of students let loose from the limits imposed at home or on campus. But the man who never retreated from the Viet Cong finally felt forced to retreat from the unruly behavior of Wake Forest students, sold his home and moved away.
The Rev. Rufus Culler, another of our veteran neighbors, served in the U.S. Marine Corps First Division from 1941-1945, most of it in combat duty in the South Pacific. He was in the assault forces that established a beachhead on Guadalcanal in August of 1942, and held it until December when they were finally compelled to withdraw. Now in his old age, and somewhat fragile, he has often been assaulted by noise from nearby houses rented by Wake Forest students. Your Student Life Division is aware of instances that led to police reports in September and citations in February. In the latter instance, I heard the roar of the crowd while at home on Marlowe Avenue, and I assumed it was coming from the Soccer Stadium. It was, in fact, coming from 1460 Brookwood Drive.
When the neighborhood is quiet, Rev. Culler will venture out, cane in hand, for a walk down Brookwood. He is distressed to find himself passing houses with piles of trash and litter in plain view, and four or more large vehicles regularly parked in front lawns that will, within a few months, be transformed into muddy ruts and grassless front yards.
Consider Jenny and Jim Lynch, who built their home on Bethabara Road (now University Parkway) at Lakewood in 1955, from which they watched the bulldozers shaping the landscape of the new campus across the road. They considered the advent of Wake Forest as a blessing for themselves as well as the entire Winston-Salem community, and they attended educational events open to the public. But, in the mid 1960s, when the corner house across Lakewood became one of the earliest to be occupied by Wake Forest students, the blessing took on a decidedly mixed character. That may have been the first disruptive party house in the Brookwood area. When all other attempts toward resolution failed, Jenny Lynch wrote her first letter of complaint, to then President James Ralph Scales, in 1969.
It's a characteristic of the off-campus student impacts on neighborhoods that a problem resolved is localized to a particular address, while the general pattern continues nearby. The Lynches now have a thick folder documenting four decades of interactions with students, landlords. administrators, and police. Their complaints, from the beginning, have been about the disruptive behavior of students, and the deterioration of a once beautiful neighborhood. Student rental houses up and down Brookwood are all too easily identified by trash, litter, and multiple vehicles on muddy front yards that were well-maintained grassy lawns before students began parking on them. The pride that Jenny and Jim once knew as homeowners in an attractive well-maintained neighborhood is long gone. For them, the blessing has become a darkening cloud shadowing their declining years.
For these I speak, and for many others similarly situated. Their right to the peaceable enjoyment of their property has been subjected to the annual incursion of a growing student population that invariably gives rise to disruptive parties. Add to that the careless indifference of privileged youth regarding the decent maintenance of a rental house, and the blight spreads like kudzu. With love and pride in home and neighborhood undermined, anger and embitterment often finds its way into the soul, and one's humanity and spirit is diminished.
Is this tolerable to you, Dr. Hatch, that these good people, including compatriots who risked life and limb for our country, should have their golden years turned into leaden discontent by the errant behavior of Wake Forest students?
We believe Wake Forest can and should do more to address these problems. And your predecessor Dr. Thomas Hearn promised more when, at a meeting (Spring Semester, 1999) with his Senior Administrators to which UANA representatives were invited, he said: "We are embarrassed. We are ashamed and we accept this is our problem and you are the victims. You can rest assured we will aggressively attack this problem. We will take whatever action we need to in order to correct this problem. Thank you for coming and again I assure you we will work with you to correct this."
For ten years UANA has engaged with Wake Forest within the framework of what we now call the University Area Community Partnership. The revision of off-campus policies in 1999 encouraged us to believe that large scale disruptive parties would become a diminishingly infrequent occurrence as students had to apply for an off-campus residential address known to the college, and would discover that unwanted sanctions are promptly imposed for Rule 16 violations. For a few years, we felt that progress was taking place. But that is no longer the case.
Every fall the familiar cycle is renewed, with Wake Forest students in our midst, many of them oblivious or indifferent to the disruptive character of their parties, and to the trash and litter on their lawns unattended for days and weeks on end. Such code violations are common in our neighborhoods, along with the occasional sofas and stuffed chairs outside, providing a nesting place for rodents or vermin. When the parties are over, the blight is still there, as if mocking resident homeowners who have invested a labor of love in maintaining and beautifying their homes and gardens.
Whatever sanctions are in place, they have not prevented new incidents well into the second semester, as occurred on Brookwood Drive on February 7, and on Friendship Circle on February 13. (I've read email reporting "droves of students passing [a resident's] house for over an hour . . . yelling and screaming," and when police arrived, students fleeing across the yards of nearby residents between Friendship and Polo.) Such occurrences late in the school year are not uncommon. And the likelihood that warmer weather will prompt more disruptions seems compelling evidence that Wake Forest's sanctions have little or no deterrent effect. Prolonged delays between an incident and sanctions further weaken their effect, while graduating seniors may face no sanctions at all.
It is now common knowledge that your student expansion policy will result in even more students in our neighborhoods, and anxieties have been on the rise. What can we expect from Wake Forest in regard to these concerns? We had been hoping for an increased level of responsiveness, and were dismayed by what appears to us a retreat from the college's commitment to our community. From 1999 until 2007-2008, the "Terms and Conditions" for Off-campus housing included this:
* All activities on the premises, and the upkeep of the premises, must be consistent with the residential character of the neighborhood and in accordance with standards of decency and decorum expected of Wake Forest students.
Implicit in this rule is a recognition of Wake Forest's authority to require standards appropriate to our residential neighborhood, and its responsibility to our community to limit
the negative impact of student conduct. But that item was quietly removed prior to Fall Semester matriculation, without even the courtesy of informing UANA, a UACP partner. When we learned of it and attempted to voice our objections at a recent UACP meeting, we very soon understood that the decision, having come from the Senior Administration, was effectively beyond the purview of the UACP.
We are upset about this decision. From our experience with the city's response to nuisance-type violations, we have learned that enforcement of such city codes depends primarily on complaints made to Neighborhood Services. And we know that delay, sometimes a long protracted delay, is an unavoidable part of the process. Satisfactory outcomes tend to be sporadic, incomplete, and temporary, while the deterioration and blight inflicted on our neighborhood by your students continues apace.
Wake Forest, with its institutional authority and its permitting process for student residents off-campus, has the capacity to help ameliorate this problem. Apropos of this, the City Manager's office suggested to you, in October, an initiative by which Wake Forest can effectively address one significant part of the problem -- the widespread student practice of parking in front yards. Nothing can convert a well-maintained lawn into a muddy eyesore more quickly than four or more vehicles rolling over it day after day. We are hoping you intend a positive and constructive response to their proposal, and soon enough to require suitable parking spaces and maintenance of front lawns in all single family houses rented by Wake Forest students for the 2009-2010 school year.
But our hopes are hedged by uneasiness. Here, as elsewhere, we can discern the distance from our situation that your Senior Administration seems to prefer. A distance suggestive of disdain. My first glimpse of it came years ago at a public hearing at the Zoning Board of Adjustment, when residential neighbors were concerned about your proposed electric power substation to be located at the convergence of University Parkway and Cherry Street. When the ZBA Chairman, Dr. Lee Bailey, inquired whether Wake Forest had made any effort to meet with and discuss the concerns of neighbors, Wake Forest representatives acknowledged they had not. Dr. Bailey's only comment was: "You have not been good neighbors!"
As President of Wake Forest University, you have set before the campus community, the larger Winston-Salem community, and your alumni everywhere, the vision of Wake Forest as an educational institution that will effectively serve humanity. And the scope of that ambition encompasses the world. Your Center for Pro Humanitate has inspired your students to travel to the far corners of the earth to better the human condition. Your Divinity School sends its graduates out with Dean Bill Leonard's exhortation to remember the question: "Has everyone been served?"
As praiseworthy as all that is, I cannot yet applaud. My attempt to praise would not be whole-hearted; it might be the sound of one hand clapping. For the light of your vision does not shine for us -- the invisible community just outside your gates. And we have not been served.
So I must ask you, Dr. Hatch, are we a community you care to concern yourself with? Or are we rather like Charles Lamb's poor relations, whose every approach rebounds upon them as a reproach for their stumbling attempts to relate to their betters?
Sincerely yours,
Robert H. Vorsteg, Community Liaison
University Area Neighborhood Association
c:
Kenneth A. Zick, Vice President for Student Life
J. Reid Morgan, Vice President and General Counsel
Mayor Allen Joines
Council Member Wanda Merschel
Council Member Nelson Malloy, Jr.
City Manager Lee Garrity
City Attorney Angela Carmon
Police Chief Scott Cunningham
Nathan O. Hatch, President
Wake Forest University
P. O. Box 7226
Winston-Salem, NC 27109
Dear President Hatch:
When I wrote my first letter to you in October of 2007, I felt hopeful that a President who clearly intended to lead Wake Forest University toward a fuller realization of its potential for greatness, and committed to elevating its motto of Pro Humanitate, would never be content to allow a neighborhood just outside its gates to experience a continuation of conditions that deprive its residents of the peaceable enjoyment of their own homes, when these conditions are the result of a growing number of Wake Forest students residing in our midst. They are now notably present on almost every street in our neighborhood, and our conditions have grown worse. But I am not yet ready to abandon my hopes.
I attempted to explain our neighborhood conditions in general terms, but perhaps an historian might find specific examples more telling. In my earlier letter I mentioned a former UANA president, a decorated combat veteran who had faced enemy fire in Vietnam, had returned home and lived happily for years on Harmon Drive, and for a time kept his composure while dealing with the gradual encroachment of students let loose from the limits imposed at home or on campus. But the man who never retreated from the Viet Cong finally felt forced to retreat from the unruly behavior of Wake Forest students, sold his home and moved away.
The Rev. Rufus Culler, another of our veteran neighbors, served in the U.S. Marine Corps First Division from 1941-1945, most of it in combat duty in the South Pacific. He was in the assault forces that established a beachhead on Guadalcanal in August of 1942, and held it until December when they were finally compelled to withdraw. Now in his old age, and somewhat fragile, he has often been assaulted by noise from nearby houses rented by Wake Forest students. Your Student Life Division is aware of instances that led to police reports in September and citations in February. In the latter instance, I heard the roar of the crowd while at home on Marlowe Avenue, and I assumed it was coming from the Soccer Stadium. It was, in fact, coming from 1460 Brookwood Drive.
When the neighborhood is quiet, Rev. Culler will venture out, cane in hand, for a walk down Brookwood. He is distressed to find himself passing houses with piles of trash and litter in plain view, and four or more large vehicles regularly parked in front lawns that will, within a few months, be transformed into muddy ruts and grassless front yards.
Consider Jenny and Jim Lynch, who built their home on Bethabara Road (now University Parkway) at Lakewood in 1955, from which they watched the bulldozers shaping the landscape of the new campus across the road. They considered the advent of Wake Forest as a blessing for themselves as well as the entire Winston-Salem community, and they attended educational events open to the public. But, in the mid 1960s, when the corner house across Lakewood became one of the earliest to be occupied by Wake Forest students, the blessing took on a decidedly mixed character. That may have been the first disruptive party house in the Brookwood area. When all other attempts toward resolution failed, Jenny Lynch wrote her first letter of complaint, to then President James Ralph Scales, in 1969.
It's a characteristic of the off-campus student impacts on neighborhoods that a problem resolved is localized to a particular address, while the general pattern continues nearby. The Lynches now have a thick folder documenting four decades of interactions with students, landlords. administrators, and police. Their complaints, from the beginning, have been about the disruptive behavior of students, and the deterioration of a once beautiful neighborhood. Student rental houses up and down Brookwood are all too easily identified by trash, litter, and multiple vehicles on muddy front yards that were well-maintained grassy lawns before students began parking on them. The pride that Jenny and Jim once knew as homeowners in an attractive well-maintained neighborhood is long gone. For them, the blessing has become a darkening cloud shadowing their declining years.
For these I speak, and for many others similarly situated. Their right to the peaceable enjoyment of their property has been subjected to the annual incursion of a growing student population that invariably gives rise to disruptive parties. Add to that the careless indifference of privileged youth regarding the decent maintenance of a rental house, and the blight spreads like kudzu. With love and pride in home and neighborhood undermined, anger and embitterment often finds its way into the soul, and one's humanity and spirit is diminished.
Is this tolerable to you, Dr. Hatch, that these good people, including compatriots who risked life and limb for our country, should have their golden years turned into leaden discontent by the errant behavior of Wake Forest students?
We believe Wake Forest can and should do more to address these problems. And your predecessor Dr. Thomas Hearn promised more when, at a meeting (Spring Semester, 1999) with his Senior Administrators to which UANA representatives were invited, he said: "We are embarrassed. We are ashamed and we accept this is our problem and you are the victims. You can rest assured we will aggressively attack this problem. We will take whatever action we need to in order to correct this problem. Thank you for coming and again I assure you we will work with you to correct this."
For ten years UANA has engaged with Wake Forest within the framework of what we now call the University Area Community Partnership. The revision of off-campus policies in 1999 encouraged us to believe that large scale disruptive parties would become a diminishingly infrequent occurrence as students had to apply for an off-campus residential address known to the college, and would discover that unwanted sanctions are promptly imposed for Rule 16 violations. For a few years, we felt that progress was taking place. But that is no longer the case.
Every fall the familiar cycle is renewed, with Wake Forest students in our midst, many of them oblivious or indifferent to the disruptive character of their parties, and to the trash and litter on their lawns unattended for days and weeks on end. Such code violations are common in our neighborhoods, along with the occasional sofas and stuffed chairs outside, providing a nesting place for rodents or vermin. When the parties are over, the blight is still there, as if mocking resident homeowners who have invested a labor of love in maintaining and beautifying their homes and gardens.
Whatever sanctions are in place, they have not prevented new incidents well into the second semester, as occurred on Brookwood Drive on February 7, and on Friendship Circle on February 13. (I've read email reporting "droves of students passing [a resident's] house for over an hour . . . yelling and screaming," and when police arrived, students fleeing across the yards of nearby residents between Friendship and Polo.) Such occurrences late in the school year are not uncommon. And the likelihood that warmer weather will prompt more disruptions seems compelling evidence that Wake Forest's sanctions have little or no deterrent effect. Prolonged delays between an incident and sanctions further weaken their effect, while graduating seniors may face no sanctions at all.
It is now common knowledge that your student expansion policy will result in even more students in our neighborhoods, and anxieties have been on the rise. What can we expect from Wake Forest in regard to these concerns? We had been hoping for an increased level of responsiveness, and were dismayed by what appears to us a retreat from the college's commitment to our community. From 1999 until 2007-2008, the "Terms and Conditions" for Off-campus housing included this:
* All activities on the premises, and the upkeep of the premises, must be consistent with the residential character of the neighborhood and in accordance with standards of decency and decorum expected of Wake Forest students.
Implicit in this rule is a recognition of Wake Forest's authority to require standards appropriate to our residential neighborhood, and its responsibility to our community to limit
the negative impact of student conduct. But that item was quietly removed prior to Fall Semester matriculation, without even the courtesy of informing UANA, a UACP partner. When we learned of it and attempted to voice our objections at a recent UACP meeting, we very soon understood that the decision, having come from the Senior Administration, was effectively beyond the purview of the UACP.
We are upset about this decision. From our experience with the city's response to nuisance-type violations, we have learned that enforcement of such city codes depends primarily on complaints made to Neighborhood Services. And we know that delay, sometimes a long protracted delay, is an unavoidable part of the process. Satisfactory outcomes tend to be sporadic, incomplete, and temporary, while the deterioration and blight inflicted on our neighborhood by your students continues apace.
Wake Forest, with its institutional authority and its permitting process for student residents off-campus, has the capacity to help ameliorate this problem. Apropos of this, the City Manager's office suggested to you, in October, an initiative by which Wake Forest can effectively address one significant part of the problem -- the widespread student practice of parking in front yards. Nothing can convert a well-maintained lawn into a muddy eyesore more quickly than four or more vehicles rolling over it day after day. We are hoping you intend a positive and constructive response to their proposal, and soon enough to require suitable parking spaces and maintenance of front lawns in all single family houses rented by Wake Forest students for the 2009-2010 school year.
But our hopes are hedged by uneasiness. Here, as elsewhere, we can discern the distance from our situation that your Senior Administration seems to prefer. A distance suggestive of disdain. My first glimpse of it came years ago at a public hearing at the Zoning Board of Adjustment, when residential neighbors were concerned about your proposed electric power substation to be located at the convergence of University Parkway and Cherry Street. When the ZBA Chairman, Dr. Lee Bailey, inquired whether Wake Forest had made any effort to meet with and discuss the concerns of neighbors, Wake Forest representatives acknowledged they had not. Dr. Bailey's only comment was: "You have not been good neighbors!"
As President of Wake Forest University, you have set before the campus community, the larger Winston-Salem community, and your alumni everywhere, the vision of Wake Forest as an educational institution that will effectively serve humanity. And the scope of that ambition encompasses the world. Your Center for Pro Humanitate has inspired your students to travel to the far corners of the earth to better the human condition. Your Divinity School sends its graduates out with Dean Bill Leonard's exhortation to remember the question: "Has everyone been served?"
As praiseworthy as all that is, I cannot yet applaud. My attempt to praise would not be whole-hearted; it might be the sound of one hand clapping. For the light of your vision does not shine for us -- the invisible community just outside your gates. And we have not been served.
So I must ask you, Dr. Hatch, are we a community you care to concern yourself with? Or are we rather like Charles Lamb's poor relations, whose every approach rebounds upon them as a reproach for their stumbling attempts to relate to their betters?
Sincerely yours,
Robert H. Vorsteg, Community Liaison
University Area Neighborhood Association
c:
Kenneth A. Zick, Vice President for Student Life
J. Reid Morgan, Vice President and General Counsel
Mayor Allen Joines
Council Member Wanda Merschel
Council Member Nelson Malloy, Jr.
City Manager Lee Garrity
City Attorney Angela Carmon
Police Chief Scott Cunningham
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