As freshman finance major Josh Greenstein neared the Quad, he was surprised to see a mass of yellow caution tape encircling the area and blocking students’ entrance with the words, ‘Restricted area, do not disturb.’

Despite the hindrance, Greenstein, like other students, stepped over the strips of tape and sat on the grass, without knowledge that what he was really taking part in was a project by three students for their gender space and power class.

‘It looked like it was something where they didn’t want you to step on plants or something,’ Greenstein said. ‘I don’t want to say it was depressing, but it was out of place. … It felt like you were at a construction site or a crime scene.’

Third-year architecture students Maggie Karshner and Andy Persons, along with senior women’s studies and sociology major Matt Reitman, came up with the idea for the project. They wanted to find a way to make it known to people who use the Quad that, while many students believe the Quad is a public area, it is truly under the private ownership of Syracuse University, like the rest of the campus, Karshner said.

The three students then made a presentation in class and discussed ways to execute their idea.

‘We looked at it more from the power perspective, like the power the university has over the space of the Quad,’ Karshner said. ‘We had to keep people off of the space.’

The students also created eight signs advertising fake student organizations, Karshner said.

‘The signs we used were meant to illustrate the proper means by which student organizations must obtain permission to use the Quad,’ the students said in a written statement explaining their intentions with the project. ‘The organizations and uses we posted on the signs were paradoxical of issues discussed in class.’

According to Student Centers and Programming Services director Bridget Talbot, the three students, with the help of their professor, Lori Brown, had to first submit an outdoor space request form for permission to use the Quad, since it is private property.

‘To schedule the Quad you come to the office and we have a request form that you fill out,’ said Sue McArdell, administrative specialist at SCPS.

Talbot said this form is also available on the Internet.

The request for permission to surround the Quad with caution tape, however, was a ‘very, very unique situation,’ McArdell said. Normally, SCPS receives applications from student organizations wishing to advertise a rally or an event in chalk on the Quad.

‘You have to give the dates and time of what you’re doing and then we just approve it if everything’s OK and e-mail the person back,’ McArdell said.

After the application is approved SCPS contacts several departments on campus to notify them of what the student organization or academic department will be doing, Talbot said.

The three students’ project was the third in a series of projects done by students in the same class. It was Brown who contacted SCPS and applied for the use of the Quad for the projects, Talbot said. A fourth project involving a structure for holding beach balls is still under revision by SCPS.

Talbot said she met with Brown, Karshner, Reitman and Persons to find out more about what their project involved about a month ago.

Though many students, and even some professors, thought the caution tape was put up because the Quad was being reseeded with grass, the students said they were happy with the results of their experiment.

According to Karshner, who made a time-lapse recording on the Quad the day before and the day of the project, students’ activity was the same on both days, despite the addition of the caution tape and signs.

‘One sign disappeared, and that was the one that explained what was going on,’ Karshner said. ‘I heard a lot of people say they thought it was pesticide. … There was a lot of confusion and students didn’t take heed to the restricted area.’

For Greenstein and many students, the temporary barrier to their access to the Quad was not too large of an inconvenience.

‘I just wanted to sit down for a while and relax,’ Greenstein said.

Though Karshner admits one failure of the project was that she and her group did not explain enough to students about what was going on, she is convinced her group did succeed in executing their original idea.

‘We wanted people to think about (public and private space),’ she said.

Published on April 20, 2005 at 12:00 pm