At times, sharing a neighborhood with Syracuse students can be aggravating for Gavan Duffy.

‘One year, it seemed like there was a nightclub next door,’ said Duffy, an associate professor of political science.

Having lived just a few blocks from campus for more than a decade, he’s had more than a few run-ins with students. From dealing with drunken undergraduates urinating on his lawn, to watching a student try to attack a tree in the wee hours of the morning, to having his mailbox stolen by the ski team, he’s been through a lot.

‘On campus, I’m treated with this sort of deference,’ Duffy said. ‘But out here, it’s more ‘F— you, old guy.”

Things have been better lately though.

‘No one has peed in my bushes for a few years now,’ Duffy said.

Still, every school year new students shuffle in and out of the communities that professors like Duffy have lived in for decades. Every year, neighborhood residents deal with the same problems: excess noise, irresponsible driving and a surplus of litter.

While many students do not cause trouble for their older, more domesticated neighbors, the ones that do can be a consistent disturbance.

For Duffy, one of the biggest problems is the congestion caused by students’ cars. Parking four or five cars in a driveway intended to hold only two or three often creates an overflow that forces pedestrians to walk closer to oncoming traffic.

‘The cars are in the middle of the sidewalk entrances, which means you have to step around them into the street when you’re walking,’ he said.

Vehicles parallel-parked on the street clog up lanes for ambulances and fire trucks, Duffy said.

‘This city was not designed to hold this many cars,’ he said, also mentioning that too many students drive like ‘maniacs’ and put pedestrians in danger.

Empty red Solo cups, crushed cans of Natural Light and trash strewn on the streets, lawns and sidewalks of the neighborhoods may go unnoticed by the average student, but can be exasperating to others.

‘Nothing gets under my skin more than having to clean up a beer bottle or a condom or something off my lawn,’ said Harvey Teres, an associate professor in the English department who lives in the Berkeley Park area, a block south of Euclid Avenue.

Teres’ experience with students is a more recent phenomenon, as his neighborhood has only opened up to undergraduates in the past few years. Berkley Park is traditionally a more residential area as compared to the houses closer to Euclid.

The problem is not usually the new neighbors, but those who flock to their homes, as parties empty out over the course of the night and steady streams of inebriated students fill the streets with their voices, Teres said.

‘It can be really unpleasant at times,’ said Teres, who has a three-year-old daughter.

Members of Teres’ neighborhood association have been working recently to prevent students from encroaching on their turf. As more landlords are trying to split up family homes for sale and rent them out for students, the neighborhood association is asking the landlords to try and sell them to families, as well, Teres said.

The group has even considered pooling together its own assets to buy the house and then rent it out to a family, replacing the landlord as a middleman, Teres said.

‘We haven’t had to do anything like that yet, but it is something that’s been discussed,’ he said.

Still, neither Teres nor Duffy made any mention of moving to a new area in the near future.

Other professors, however, have fewer qualms about life in the area.

Hub Brown, chair of the broadcast journalism department at Newhouse, has lived with his family on Livingston Avenue for the past six years and said he never regrets the decision.

‘The students we’ve had (near us) have been great neighbors,’ he said.

His wife, Nicci Brown, associate vice president of marketing and interactive media at SU’s Institutional Advancement department, said weekend festivities do not bother them much.

‘We don’t mind when students have parties,’ she said. ‘We have parties at our house. I think adults often forget that we were young, too.’

The environment’s atmosphere is invigorating for the couple.

‘We enjoy the energy of living near the campus,’ Nicci Brown said, as both husband and wife noted the celebration after the basketball team’s triumph in 2003 as a high point.

As the Browns explained, not every off-campus interaction between professor and student has to be a contentious one. Many students believe both professors and students should not have that much trouble co-existing as neighbors.

Living near professors has not been a problem for senior Seth Appleman, a computer science major.

‘I didn’t even know professors lived around here,’ said Appleman, who has lived near the Browns on Livingston for the past two years.

‘I’ve never had a problem with noise or parking or anything,’ he said.

Samantha Soto, a sophomore political science major cautioned that faculty should find out who their neighbors are before they move in.

‘Professors should know what they are getting into if they want to live near students,’ Soto said.

However, she insisted that both faculty and students have the right to a quiet neighborhood.

Reiterating that most students do not cause problems, Duffy said, ‘It’s important that the students take it upon themselves to police the area.’

And, make sure that no one relieves themselves in the professor’s bushes.

Published on November 30, 2006 at 12:00 pm