After a month on campus, UA students are causing problems for nearby residents once again.

At last week’s Faculty Senate meeting, after the mercurial relationship between the campus and its neighbors was addressed, President Ann Weaver Hart said students need to understand that “you don’t live in Yuma anymore. You don’t live in Flagstaff. You don’t live in Phoenix … You live in Tucson, and this is your home and the people with whom you live are your neighbors.”

But President Hart, we are treating Tucson as our home. The complaints occurred because we were entertaining friends in our humble abode, or we were having fun in this awesome town. We don’t live in North Philly, where the residents have bigger things to worry about than students being loud.

It may be the propellers of the helicopter on the weekends, the floodlight that travels close behind, the loud music and voices blasting out of hundreds of off-campus college residences, or even the voices carrying through the walls at 3 a.m. as students talk about how screwed they are for tomorrow’s test.

No matter how you look at it, we can’t deny that, as students, we’re pretty damn annoying.
But Tucson locals aren’t completely innocent either. What in the world did you think life would be like when you moved within a 4-mile radius of a college campus and one that is often ranked, not in U.S. News and World Report, but in Playboy magazine and Forbes magazine as one of the biggest party schools?

It’s completely unreasonable to think that life would be quiet and peaceful while those nice college kids next door do their homework and study in the library.

Compromise is necessary.

The college students have finished their homework and want to have fun, but the non-college aged residents have to work in the morning. The age gap is a nuisance, but it doesn’t have to define the relationship between the college and the neighboring community.

Students can be more considerate of others around them when partying. Let the neighbors know if there will be a big party and bake them some cookies or something, so they’re at least mentally prepared for the noise that awaits them. Not only would these tiny gestures help the neighborhood, they’d help prevent the infamous red tag, a fate every college student fears.

Residents of Tucson, cut us some slack. As 15-year resident Ajia Simone said in an article about the District on 5th apartment complex the Arizona Daily Wildcat published on Sept. 5, “Everyone is set in their ways, but we live in a college area … it’s just a part of the natural growth of the neighborhood.”

As the university grows, the space that students need increases as well.

It’s tiring having to face the noise weekend after weekend, year after year, and it’s frustrating to hear that you just have to let college students be college students.

So talk to the college students around you. If you let them know what’s bugging you, you’d be surprised to find that most are pretty accommodating.

Call us egocentric, spoiled, technology-obsessed youngsters, but sometimes we simply don’t realize we’re bothering you.

— Dan Desrochers is a pre-journalism sophomore. He can be reached at letters@wildcat.ariona.edu or on Twitter via @drdesrochers.