Tour Groups. An unavoidable nuisance that comes with living and attending classes on campus. Over the past semesters I’ve come across some behavior that makes me question whether people understand that they’re visiting an actual college campus and not in some scripted show put on for them for funzies.
Walking in front of oncoming foot traffic. Blocking pathways. Blocking entrances to residence halls. Verbally harassing female students. Shouting at a student for bumping them when the parent was walking into oncoming foot traffic. Heh, it’s quite a list.
Isn’t there some type of tour group etiquette? What happened to walking with the flow of foot traffic or following the flow of high traffic entrances and exits of buildings? Don’t get me wrong. It’s great to see people learning about my school, but I wish parents and students would be respectful and remember that the campus is alive and functioning when they come to visit.
honestly I think perhaps you ought to change your behavior just a bit. I would expect that a student would just walk around a large group on the sidewalk. And you’re blaming them for walking in particular places? Aren’t they following the guide? Of course harassing anyone is out of bounds, but most of your complaints are a bit silly.
My behavior is pretty adaptable and I cater largely to tour groups. Many students, including myself, walk around the tour groups when possible. The instances I am talking about are in high traffic areas. On campus we have large sidewalks, when the tour groups walks they take up the whole sidewalk even when there’s a high volume of students. It ultimately changes the whole walking pattern to a dysfunctional chaos of walkers, long boarders and bike riders because people don’t want to walk in a blob, but rather a line.
I’m just saying, it’d really help that if when a someone is on a tour guide, they’re aware of their surroundings. This means that the person is aware that they are walking in front of opposing foot traffic, they’re aware that they’re standing in from tot residence halls preventing people from entering the building, and etcetera.
“I wish parents and students would be respectful and remember that the campus is alive and functioning when they come to visit.”
Yes. And triple this for plain old tourists on commercial tours who aren’t considering an application. It’s a real problem when they treat the campus as a tourist attraction and the students as entertainment or zoo creatures.
I do the same thing with a tour group as I do anything else that’s annoyingly in my way- take the 15 seconds to walk around them and be on my merry way.
@Niquii77 The fact that there are people on tours–the very people that may attend that school–harassing female students is horrifying. You might be able to lodge a complaint with the admissions office if you can catch their name (and what’s more of an anti-hook than misogyny?)
And then there was the family on one tour went on who (1) held the start of the tour up because “they’re almost here now”, (2) talked loudly to each other during the tour even when the guide was talking, (3) various members of their family were on their phones loudly throughout the tour, and (4) derailed tour guide with questions specific to "
(highly embarrassed) child’s situation
Perhaps the tour guides at your school could use some coaching. We usually had good tour guides who usually knew how to direct us if too distracted for good etiquette. Some did it walking backwards… in flip flops.
I’d mention these issues to the admissions department in the hope that they can train the tour guides better…some things like blocking the entrances to a building can be easily changed if admissions instructs the guides to stand to one side of the entrance… My S went to grad school at a place that gets tons of visitors annually and it never seemed to be an issue. Obviously harassing female (or any) students is unacceptable and if that happened you probably should tell the tour guide.
We were on the Yale campus last weekend, and there were a lot of tourists, and some of them behaved annoyingly. As Hanna said, they sometimes act like they are visiting a zoo, as opposed to somebody’s home. The most notable example was a family in a minivan driving slowly down the street with somebody hanging out of each side of the car filming on a cellphone. Nothing was happening. What were they filming? Us putting luggage in our car?
There have been complaints of cat-calling, whistling, and un-welcomed comments about the girl’s physical appearance.
Yes, it wouldn’t hurt to stop by our office.
Ha! I really wonder what the videos they took looked like. For me, nothing will beat the time when I was changing residence halls mid-semester. As I was wheeling a cart full of crates of random belongings, a parent walked by peered into stuff and grazed the crates with her hand. No touchy!
Native New Yorkers like yours truly have to deal with this sort of behavior on occasion. In NYC, I’d have no problem raising my voice to say “s’cuse me” and/or if necessary, shoving through/past them if they’re obstructing my path…especially if I’m in a hurry.
Other New Yorkers would be far less polite about it as I’ve seen fellow native New Yorkers actually curse out tourists and recent transplants for taking up space on a sidewalk and/or otherwise acting as an obstruction for everyone else behind/around them because they’re seemingly unaware that other folks need to use the same sidewalks/pathways to get around NYC quickly in the course of their daily life.
Never had this issue with tour groups during undergrad.
Then again, if any clueless prospie tried pulling what OP cited, they’d be lucky to be let off with a loud scolding from the numerous campus activists. And if there was catcalling from a prospie, the tour guide/adcoms will definitely make note of that as that’s not the type of student most of the campus community would want among them.
I don’t think OP’s asking for much beyond asking campus tour groups made up of soon-to-be young adults/young adults and parents to be aware of their surroundings and not behave like complete idiots.
OP can complain to admissions. They’re running the tours, no? As for catcalls, super strange on a college tour. If this is real, maybe hs tours as opposed to families, then again, you go to the control point. Admissions.
We never experienced this on a college tour. Crowds tended to part like the sea for students. And just as many students tend to smile and walk around, if they can. I’m on campus or driving by all the time and see this mutual respect.
Truthfully, OP can complain wherever she wants. Some posters have seen it, others don’t believe it. It’s not my job to convince them otherwise. I am not asking too much, but people can respond to this thread however they want.
Oddly enough, one female student brought up her concerns on social just as a quick question to see if others had noticed anything and it was clear a small number of males didn’t see anything wrong with it. But, hey, what else can you expect? The same guys you see writing articles claiming they wish they were cat called gotta go to school, too, right?
Going off of your New York examples, perhaps the reason the tour groups spread out on the sidewalks is because they didn’t like being a pin ball in traffic on the drive over! Traffic in the surrounding city needs time to get used to and, well, from such a long time being overly aware needs some recovery time.
Umm… I fear you may have misread something and taken offense. I haven’t seen anyone suggest they didn’t believe you.
On 3 campus tours we took, the guide made it a point to tell his/her crowd to clear a path for students/bikes/golf carts as the situations required. At one, there was a group of students playing frisbee right in what would have been the tour path, so the guide took us the long way around.
Just like others have said, Admissions ought to be told so they can train their guides accordingly to your campus. And if a guide were to expel a catcalling {unflattering noun}, that would only improve that college in my esteem. The notion that a tour guide would allow harassment on their tour suggests that the campus does not put safety and respect as priorities.
I totally agree that it’s astounding the level of obnoxious rudeness that some can show. Haven’t seen it in any group I’ve been in, but I’m not surprised at all. I see it all over elsewhere- shopping malls, sidewalks, highways.
I think colleges should make an effort to have less unwieldy tour group sizes. Hire more students to give tours. Some of the tour groups are ridiculously large making it hard to navigate without getting in the way, as well as difficult to hear if you are one the tour. Loved the few schools who made an effort to have one on one tours.
