The Targum on Campus Beautification

A hile back we talked in class about how local papers cover issues of planning and design. This past week, The Daily Targum had a column bemoaning the current state of the campus and its facilities. Rather than focusing on a string of budget crises or questioning financial emphases, the author turned to sociology to begin asking where to begin:

Others may say that the students at Rutgers are inherently more prone to debauchery than Princeton students. I say it's because people at Rutgers see other people at Rutgers not caring. The environment dictates what people do. This all reminded me of New York City and how it got cleaned up. New York went from one of the most dangerous cities in the United States to one of the safest in a span of about a decade. The most prevalent theory on how New York cut its crime and filth so dramatically was the broken windows theory. This theory essentially states that when people see that nothing is done about a small infraction, they are more likely to do it themselves. This leads to greater and greater infractions until it is out of control. If someone sees that a window is broken and it stays that way, that person assumes that no one cares about that building, so why should he or she?

The folks at Scarlet Nation piled on too.