Sometime between midnight and 8:30 a.m. on Friday, April 4, Northwestern’s chapel sanctuary was pranked. It isn’t clear right now how the students involved gained access to the chapel.
“We haven’t pushed how (the students) got in because it wasn’t the most crucial issue,” Dean of Students Julie Vermeer Elliott said. “We were more concerned with the damage that was done and with the domino effect the prank had on other members of the campus community.”
The prank was discovered on Friday morning. Students had unscrewed the brackets that hold the pews in place and, in the front half of the chapel, had turned pairs of pews to face each other. In the back of the chapel, they had angled the pews from the center aisle toward the walls. Many of the pews’ brackets were broken and the screw holes stripped.
On Saturday, the maintenance crew called in the pew-manufacturing company to assess the damage to the pews and to give an estimate of how much repairs would cost the school. The administration is still waiting for an estimate from the company.
After the prank was discovered, the administration’s first concern was to find out who was involved.
“This is a small campus, and you hear a lot of things,” Elliott said. “It didn’t take long to put together what happened and to have a substantial list of names.”
In the beginning stages of the inquiry, a few names consistently kept coming up. The administration talked with these students and told them they should encourage everyone else involved to email Elliott and confess their involvement in the prank. So far, 19 students have come forward, but no names are being released by the administration.
Elliott, Director of Residence Life Marlin Haverdink and President Greg Christy will meet with the students next week to inform them of their contracts. Elliott would not comment on what form of punishment the students will receive.
This is not the first prank to be pulled in the chapel, but members of the administration said they hope it will be the last. Elliott said that in the near future, surveillance cameras will be installed in the chapel.
“All of the newer buildings on campus have surveillance cameras in them, so it was probably time for the chapel to have them installed anyway,” Elliott said.
Elliott said she did not foresee any changes in the hours the chapel is left unlocked, but she is concerned that pranks can easily cross over into something more serious.
“Does the prank cause damage to college property?” Elliott said. “Is it disruptive of college programs? Does it require staff members to exert more labor than they would have had to? These are the lines that distinguish a simple prank from a serious one.”