“It’s tough to be, you know, 18, and you can’t go into a bar, and your only option is to party in res, and to have that be actively discouraged to a greater degree in Vanier than in Totem, seems like a little bit of bullshit to me.”

So said Place Vanier Residence Advisor Alex Van Drunen. Place Vanier and Totem Park are the only university residences on campus that house students under 19, and there persists a myth that Totem Park is a louder, rowdier residence than Place Vanier.

UBC Housing administration claims that they are trying to dispel this reputation, but Drunen said he received advice both from a member of UBC Housing administration and returning RAs during his summer training session that contradict this.

“We were specifically told in training…that if a party gets out of hand, we were to send it to Totem—tell people to go to Totem.”

Totem of ill repute

Most students accept the fact that Totem possesses the reputation as the boisterous residence, but are divided on the issue of whether or not this reputation is valid.

Totem resident and first-year Arts student Cecilia Brar said, “I was told that Totem had more of a party scene, [but] I really haven’t noticed it to be that much more than Vanier’s.”

Vanier resident and first-year Arts student Olya Kushniryk disagrees. “Totem is too crazy…I go there more to party than Vanier.”

The residence contracts are the same for both Totem and Vanier. Students are given points for breaking rules, and may be evicted based on the number of points they have accrued, depending on the severity of their infractions. Eviction rates over the past five years have been relatively similar in both residences.

Kate Ferguson, the Assistant Director of Residence Life at UBC, said that the most common instances of rule-breaking are due to high noise levels, or poor decisions as a result of alcohol consumption.

But Drunen claims that RAs at Place Vanier face more pressure to be strict about what constitutes an out-of-control party. He said that in his own experience as an RA, he was forced to shut down parties he did not believe were out of hand. “Sometimes parties are just loud, and we’re told to break them up.”

When asked about his own speculations as to why Totem continues to be seen as the “party residence,” Drunen said: “It could be that somebody higher up in the administration told them to be a little bit slack, or maybe…RA’s in Totem are more relaxed individuals. But the fact remains that we [Residence Advisors of Place Vanier] are pretty strict around here. We are encouraged regularly by the administrators to be.”

Equal measures

Ferguson says she too has become well aware of the differences that are said to exist between the residences.

“[Totem’s reputation] is something that has definitely come up and is talked about by students and by staff, and we are aware of it and it is something that we are really trying to get away from, because that’s a reputation that we know is out there.”

Ferguson maintains that the administration is doing the best they can to ensure that things are consistent between the two buildings. “We intentionally assign high school students entering with high academic achievements in an equal and proportionate distribution in both areas…the same types of students are living in both [Place Vanier and Totem Park]—the same number of first-year students and returning students.”

She denies Drunen’s claim that Residence Life staff are instructed to reinforce the different atmospheres at Place Vanier and Totem.

“No, that’s not the policy,” said Ferguson. “I don’t know if that was a misinterpretation on his part, or someone was giving the wrong information, but if someone is having a party in Vanier or in Totem we would encourage the staff to break it up, or to try to deal with it. If they are not able to deal with it on their own then we encourage them to call the RCMP to come and help them, but we would never say, ‘Oh, just send this to another residence,’ because then it’s going to be somebody else’s problem, and that’s not what we’re trying to do here.”

When asked whether the police are called more frequently to one residence than the other, Ferguson said, “They seem about the same…based on both anecdotal and actual statistics, it doesn’t really seem to be the case that one is louder than the other, or has more parties than the other.”

A self-fulfilling prophecy?

Ferguson suggests that the myths surrounding Totem are what continue to shape people’s beliefs about the residence.

“Sometimes we wonder if it’s a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy, like someone from the year before says, ‘Oh, you’re living in Totem, it’s such a party residence, if you wanted it to be quiet you should live in Vanier, if you want it to be loud or party you should live in Totem.’”

UBC psychology professor and Canada Research Chair of Social Psychology Toni Schmader agrees that this is a legitimate explanation of this phenomenon, and offers a more detailed explanation for why Totem’s reputation might carry some weight.

“On one hand, you create a self-selecting sample. Students who want to party in residence will put down the residence with the reputation for partying as their first preference when applying to residence…you will also have students facing normative pressures…so that students who don’t normally party may feel like they have to live up to an expectation.”

Whether or not Totem’s reputation is grounded in fact, it remains acknowledged both by students and Residence Life staff. And despite UBC’s best efforts to dismiss this myth, Drunen’s claim that Vanier RAs were told to direct rowdy parties to Totem suggests that the expectations surrounding Totem have influenced the attitudes of even UBC Residence Life staff, whether based in policy or not.

Taking into consideration the conclusions of psychology experiments which show how expectations shape behavior, it seems the UBC Housing will be hard-pressed to find a way to repress this myth without first addressing underlying perceptions inherent in its own system. As long as both students and Residence Life staff are aware of this reputation and believe it to have some validity, students will be influenced to behave in a manner that perpetuates Totem’s reputation.

How do labels influence our behaviour?

From 1968 to 1971, Iowan elementary school teacher Jane Elliot conducted a series of psychological exercises on her pupils to impress upon them the injustice of racial discrimination. Placing the brown-eyed students at a disadvantaged position in the class, Elliot stated that these students were inferior to blue-eyed students, who were more academically competent, well-mannered and capable of success.

Within a day, the effects of these labels became visible both in the students’ physical appearance and academic performance. Brown-eyed students began to look increasingly disheveled. Arithmetic scores and vocabulary scores showed that the blue-eyed students were performing both above the average and above their own previously measured capabilities. Test scores also revealed that the previously measured aptitudes of the brown-eyed children had deteriorated within a day of starting the experiment.

Elliot later reversed the roles of the children, placing blue-eyed children in the disadvantaged position, and found again that the children’s performance levels correlated with the labels and expectations set about them. The conclusion was that setting expectations about a group of individuals does influence change in their behavior.

Expectations also play a part

In 1978 Snyder and Swann conducted a study that demonstrated how expectations can create self-fulfilling prophecies in people’s behavior. When participants were led to believe that they would be interacting with an extrovert, they tended to ask that person different kinds of questions that made him or her come off looking more extroverted than they actually were.

Their findings could partially explain the mythology surrounding Totem. When a person learns you live in a residence with a reputation for partying, they might ask you more questions about your social life. As a result, you end up discussing your partying experiences, reinforcing the reputation of the residence. If that same person learns you live in a residence without that reputation, they might ask more questions about your academic pursuits instead.

—With files from Arshy Mann, Larisa Karr and Judy Yuen

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