After one prefect stepped down and another left the school just within the last two weeks, dorm leadership is rapidly on the decline. But rather than appoint emergency replacements, Wyoming Catholic College decided to “not let an emergency go to waste” with a quite different response. Taking advantage of the opportunity and temporarily suspending a rule of campus life, just as they temporarily suspended the technology policy last semester, there will be no prefects for the rest of the semester. Not that the school has anything against prefects of course, but as some democratically leaning freshmen have expressed concerns that “the prefect system is pointless and antiquated” the school is attempting to prove them wrong by giving haters just what they want for a semester, a school without prefects.
Trends of students behaving in a fearfully unenlightened and democratic manner, even to the point of calling for direct election of school officials, heated up last semester with the arrival of the extremely modern and revolutionary Class of 2023. Things culminated, however in one response to the IIT-directed school prefect survey, a scientific attempt to predict the school administration’s appointees for next year.
Hiding behind the anonymity of the internet, this respondee vehemently attacked all of WCC’s rule of law as an institution and the defenders of that rule saying: “The prefect system is antiquated and no longer meaningful.”
Such an attack was followed up by “Choose Democracy Now” posters all over campus, and “could have contributed to hidden pressure that made one prefect step down” as one school security analyst reported to IIT News. Not wanting to cave to these demands as they officially proclaim, the school in a way has caved, albeit temporarily with today’s temporary suspension of the office, but “hopes that students will see the errors and corruption of soul that come necessarily with democracy”. “We hope they’ll choose to order themselves better when they realize how bad things will get out without prefects. And they will” says Student Life Office director Mark Minston. The change takes effective immediately, meaning that beginning tonight, curfew will not be checked, dress code will not be enforced, and any other demands of the student handbook will be enforced only when Student Life Office personnel are around.
Cheers of freedom met this announcement in Frassati Hall this morning from freshmen eager for a chance at “freedom”. However, those more educated and wiser hope this “test” ends even sooner than the end of the semester. Jerry Callaway, a senior from Texas comments: “All of us but those freshmen have read the Republic. We know what will happen. Why the school is caving to these demands, even just to illustrate the Republic, is beyond us, but we can only hope this depraved state of affairs ends before we have absolutely massive consequences.
WCC Security will be standing by should any riots, unauthorized fight-nights, or gross violations of even freshman level understanding of justice occur, but “the next few weeks will be quite wild” was all Security Chief Andrew Matthews, a sophomore from Oregon would tell us. In the absence of prefects “dorms could see severe damage” his assistant Crispus Otmar Urgo of North Carolina also warns, while Baldwin Triumvirate head sophomore Matthew White, warns of “heavy traffic, disordered dress, and students out after curfew every night in school buildings.”
Jack Swindell, a captain in the national guard and also a sophomore at WCC has offered the support of his unit should any trouble rise to even greater levels, a support which is probably the only reason the school is actually trusting events letting this “lesson”, as they call it, happen.
With the reinstatement of the current government system planned for next year, the school also plans to appoint dorm tyrants along with prefects to provide full military as well as civil leadership to each dorm. In an attempt to move closer to the ideal city, the school also plans according to a leaked internal memo to rename both positions to simply “Guardians” and possible further changes depending on how totally this semester’s example will squash future democratic leanings.