CMC students can change party culture

ROWAN GRAY

Here’s a fact you might not know unless you’ve worked in journalism before: nearly every major journalistic body in the country prohibits the use of the Oxford comma. This is to follow the AP Stylebook, the New York Times Stylebook, the Economist Stylebook, the Canadian Press Style Guide and many more central grammatical authorities of English language journalism. Unless you’re an annoying nerd, you probably don’t know the ins and outs of the Oxford comma debate — but don’t worry. This TSL opinionator will come to the rescue and give you an extremely one-sided take on the controversial grammatical convention.

Oxford Comma — a poll from FiveThirtyEight found that 57 percent of Americans always use it, meaning more than half of Americans are grammatically alienated from their news by the absence of that all-important comma. A 7 percent majority might seem slim, but it’s impressive considering the years of effort that the authoritarian AP Stylebook has spent incorrectly insisting that the Oxford comma be kept out of English.

At Claremont McKenna College, we are lucky to have one of the most liberal alcohol policies in the U.S., but that doesn’t mean we can’t do better.

As I conclude my term as CMC student body president, I am dedicated to maintaining an unwavering commitment to improvement and progress for our community.

I believe that the events we attend, the conversations we have, and the relationships we build all contribute to our overall college experience. Our social scene makes CMC unique and special, but it can also be challenging.

To change that social culture, we as students need to change too.

The Dean of Students (DOS) can change its policies, but we as a student body must make several cultural changes to create a sustainable, long-lasting, improved culture. The administration can facilitate social life reform, but this is only sustainable with student buyin. So let’s start by exploring why we do the things we do and what values we hold as a community.

We’ll begin with wristbands.

Wristbands play a crucial role in CMC events by allowing all students to participate in social gatherings and ensuring a safe and enjoyable experience. With events often costing thousands of dollars for food, drinks, security, decorations, and activities, wristbands ensure that ASCMC can prepare and provide for the student body. The wristband system eliminates a first come, first serve approach, ensuring no one is left waiting in line and missing out on festivities.

It’s crucial to understand that wristbands are not the cause of dangerous behavior at events. Instead, it’s the actions of individuals that pose a danger.

Blaming the wristbands ignores the fundamental issue of student behavior and shifts the focus away from what truly needs to be addressed to a plastic inanimate object. Wristbands do not create exclusivity. Capacity is determined by available space and resources, regardless of whether a wristband system or a first-come, first-serve model is used. The use of wristbands does not alter the principle of capacity limitation.

All CMC students are guaran- teed a wristband, as the system has been in place for years, even before the coronavirus pandemic, to create a positive student experience and foster a strong sense of community. While wristbands may inconvenience your fit, they are necessary to sustain a happy, healthy, and safe CMC community.

Another critical step to changing the social culture is to maintain ID checks. The college ID check at the door of events serves as a uniform, equitable and quick way of keeping events secure.

In the past, members of the surrounding community have threatened ASCMC events. Pre-pandemic, for example, nine phones were stolen at one Thursday Night Club (TNC) event. At last year’s Quantum event, an older couple entered the event and made multiple people uncomfortable.

Using college IDs ensures that everyone who enters the event is part of the 5C community. An exception to the ID rule, relying on alternative forms of proof for attending the 5Cs, would result in a backlog at the entrance, slowing down the process, making it easier to fake and creating too much complexity with a lot of gray areas.

The college ID card is something we all use daily to get into buildings, dining halls and our rooms, making it a uniform and equitable system that we are already familiar with. While it may be tough to remember to bring your ID, a gentle reminder from friends can’t hurt.

What goes on during an event has an impact on the social culture as well.

At CMC, we strive to foster a welcoming and inclusive environment for all students. However, only some come to college with knowledge and experience with substances, partying and their limits.

That’s why, while ASCMC events will serve alcohol, we limit it to beer, seltzer, wine and champagne to provide a safe, on-campus and transparent way to participate.

Although 200 White Claws can disappear quickly, we are working to find ways to make sure there’s enough to go around. We always look to improve our policies and practices to serve our community better. A critical way that we as a student body can further adjust our behavior to improve the social culture is through our relationship with the DOS.

Kindness goes both ways.

As has been the case at CMC, an open social culture between DOS and students promotes transparency when situations become dangerous. This shows a rare patience and understanding we are lucky to experience. We are all trying to make the best of our transient existence here.

Saturday nights are often given up by DOS staff from their families so that they can ensure that our events run smoothly. They are dedicated to providing that our campus is safe and inclusive for all students. They do not get paid for these extra hours.

We can all take accountability for our actions and strive towards open, honest and kind interactions with each other.

While the administration has shut down events, we recognize that not all events are the same.

A hard capacity limit of 100 people doesn’t make sense for smaller events.

These smaller events can create strong social bonds, a crucial value of our culture. It is okay to acknowledge that some of the rules we encounter from the administration are unjustified. Discussions and pushback like that of the Senate last Monday are critical to our shared investment in the CMC community. Personal circumstances come with responsibility.

It’s not just the students or the DOS that need to change. It’s both of us.

As the last class to experience pre-pandemic life at 5C departs in a few months, the cultural landscape may change. Still, our responsibility is to embrace these changes and strive toward a brighter future that transcends our differences.

Yes, collective action seems far from reach, but these challenging steps can lead to effective, enduring change.

Josh Nagra CMC ’24 is from Pleasanton, California. He likes biology, raccoons, and EDM.

The central goal of grammar is to ensure writing is always coherent — and it was for this reason the Oxford comma was created. There are many sentences in which the absence of an Oxford comma creates ambiguity and confusion. Take this example: “I, Rowan, leave my estate to Peter, Mary and Paul.” See how it’s ambiguous? Am I trying to say “I leave 50 percent of my estate to Peter and 50 percent to Mary and Paul” or “I am leaving 33 percent to each?”

Now let’s add an Oxford comma: “I, Rowan, leave my estate to Peter, Mary, and Paul.” Much better.

Man, that example was boring. Let’s take a spicier one: “I invited the strippers, JFK and Stalin.” Look at that, more ambiguity! Are the strippers named JFK and Stalin, or did I invite strippers and two longdead political leaders to whatever mysterious function I’m hosting?

The Oxford comma conundrum might seem like a niche issue, but it can have substantial real-world impacts.

Take the case of a Maine dairy company which, because of a single missing Oxford comma, was successfully sued by its truck drivers for $10,000,000 in back pay. I bet that lawyer wishes they had never heard of the AP Stylebook.

Whether you’re aware of it or not, there’s a good chance that you regularly use the

If the goal of our newspapers and our writing is to express our truths with maximum clarity, the absence of the Oxford comma is a senseless tragedy — a blight on the English language. It represents a desire by the elitist designers of the AP Stylebook to make “proper writing” hard to understand to the average American. But they don’t own the English language — we do.

If you’ve made it this far into a grammar article, then hopefully you’re convinced that the Oxford comma is at a minimum highly controversial. This is all you should need to oppose the AP Stylebook and all other grammar “authorities” that oppose the legendary comma. English is, at its core, a highly experimental language that often employs flexible grammar, spelling and pronunciations. This is part of why English is so beautiful: it enables people from all around the world to contribute to a common corpus of communication. Sure, it’s unnecessarily complicated, inconsistent and hard to learn — but those are the sacrifices we have to make to keep English as diverse as it is.

Stylebooks that work to cement certain controversial grammatical conventions strip our language of its diverse beauty and make our language and by extension our lives, less interesting, less fluid and less purposeful. This article might be easy to brush off as a niche piece for the grammar nerds, but this nerd asks you: what can have more of an impact on the way you live than the very method by which you express your thoughts to the world?

Rowan Gray CM ’26 is from Sharon, Massachusetts. He wants you to know that all Oxford commas in this piece were violently deleted by his copy editors.

Jasper’s Crossword: Don’t bark at me!

20. “This new poster will really ___!” said Picea sitchensis

22. Instrument with a killer break on “In the Air Tonight”

23. Big Vegas letters

24. Frank Sinatra’s had a few

27. Yoko of “Painting to be Stepped On”

29. End of a professor’s email

32. Other, to Ofelia

33. Jester’s headgear

35. “I’ve got them in ___,” said Washingtonia filifera

39. Pizzeria order 40. ___ buco

41. Swanson whose allergies are “cowardice and weak-willed men... and hazelnuts”

42. Passports, e.g.

43. Sex cells

46. “Playing a 72 Hr Game of ___ Across Europe” (season of the YouTube show Jet Lag) 48. What you might use to buy some pain au chocolat

49. “This week’s been great, but seeing you was ___,” said Prunus avium

55. D.C. has it without representation

56. Doted on

58. LAX alternative 59. They go with odds units

DOWN

1. “Savage” rapper’s nickname

2. Both yours and mine

3. r/meal___sunday (subreddit for manic chefs)

4. What falls when you’re down?

5. “Yeah, definitely”

6. Result of a demotion, maybe

7. The White ___ (show in which Aubrey Plaza stares into my soul)

8. “Stat!”

9. Word before Jim or Shady

10. “Heavens to Betsy!”

11. Smart TV alternative

12. Sedan or minivan

13. Pronoun for an object

19. Last bit of NPR’s URL

21. 911 option

24. Motor part

25. Prefix for -graphy or -logy

26. Bad sign to an iMessage user

27. “Yikes”

28. Oscar nod, briefly

30. ___ macabre (Saint-Saëns piece)

31. Beehives, hair-wise

33. Nemesis

34. Where to get two pumps?

36. Got off the bus

37. Tupperware top

38. Escher and Hammer, for two

43. ‘make up a ___’ (Twitter meme)

44. Person with no romantic or sexual attraction, for short

45. The first item in an “I Gotta Feeling” list

47. Obamacare, briefly

48. ___ & Young

49. Pontiac Firebird, for one

50. Chill out

51. ___ kleine Nachtmusik (Mozart piece)

52. Took one’s horse to the old town road, say

53. “An ___ History Of The Time

Six Doctors Swallowed Lego Heads To See How Long They’d Take To Poo” (actual Defector article that you should Google and read)

54. Buttigieg running the DOT

57. Summer time, for short?

Oohoohoo! You found the Snozzler, TSL’s official source sniffer! Be on the lookout for it in future issues!