“This really hertz,” said student Oswald Frequario.
Photo by Madeline Mozafari and Liv Gilbert
In anticipation of the upcoming Regents budget committee meeting, UC San Diego Facilities released an anonymous feedback survey to gauge student opinions on campus construction. Since then, comments have been submitted in large volume, the majority of which being complaints about on-campus noise levels. One student wrote, “I thought the eighth floor of Geisel was supposed to be silent, and why do I get looked at funny for an innocent sneeze when the Marshall Lowers construction gets to rattle the windows as loud as they please?” Another complaint read, “I used to go to Stonehenge after my midterms in Galbraith because it was a lovely place to cry. I could be myself there, as much a wreck as I wanted to be, because I could be on my own with only the rustling tree leaves as background noise for my violent sobs. Now, it’s a cacophony of beeps, scrapes, booms, and sirens. Where will the freshmen go to be alone with their thoughts? If a student cries in the forest but their screams were drowned out by construction, did they ever really make a sound?”
In response to the feedback, UCSD sent out an announcement to all faculty, staff, and students via email. The announcement, titled “Campus Noise Ordinance Alert,” was accompanied by an air horn notification sound, regardless of the receiver’s device notification settings. It outlined UCSD’s new updated noise policy: “All persons who reside or work on campus can expect to experience a minimum of 100 decibels of background noise from the hours of 6:30 a.m. to 10:30 p.m. each business day. We have received complaints about the levels of noise in different places on campus, and in an effort to reduce uncertainty, we intend to standardize harmfully loud noises across all of campus. This way, people who choose to exist on campus will know what to expect, and no one location is more pleasant to be than another.”
The noise policy went into effect immediately, with some students reporting their time spent relaxing was interrupted by various man-made noises. One such student, Sneeth Broth, stated, “I was sitting on the park bench by the Muir soccer fields to clear my head after a particularly tangly knot theory lecture, when someone started sanding the paint off of the legs of the scoreboard there. My moment of rumination over the Jones polynomial was completely ruined.”
The backlash has grown over the past week, with students banding together to muffle and prevent campus noises by selling homemade noise cancelling headphones, dismantling Facilities-owned leaf blowers, and lining the walls of their lecture halls with noise-absorbing foam. Other students have taken the “fight fire with fire” approach, banging pots and pans and cymbals outside of University offices, stating that they will not cease until quiet is restored once more.
