Vandalism is on a heightened, steady pace this year and some students are calling on their peers to make it stop.A club on campus, called "Bridging the Gap," hosted a forum on February 4. Both the president and the dean of students were there. Notably missing: about 97 percent of the student body.Organizers said the turnout -- about 30 to 40 students -- was disappointing."One thing we were talking about is interest in this problem at school," said Lizy Hallacy '10, the club's vice president. "And as you can see when you look around, there's not as many people here as we expected."So far this academic year, there have been about 64 incidents of vandalism. There have been 14 since late-November. (The total number of cases of vandalism is according to a count taken by The Quindecim from incident reports. Numbers for last year are not available because The Q was just granted access to detailed information in August.)One of the most high profile cases of vandalism this year involved the destruction of a $1,300 catering grill owned by Goucher's contracted food company, Bon Appetit."[Vandalism] costs the college tens of thousands of dollars every year," Dean Gail Edmonds said.Edmonds provided an official count of incidents of vandalism from July 2006 through January 2007 and from July 2007 through January 2008. She said that in that first time period, there were 97 incidents of vandalism. She confirmed The Q's estimate for cases so far this year."The majority of incidents -- about two-thirds -- occur over weekends, are discovered during the early morning hours and really they are observed by Public Safety or CAs or other staff in the residence halls," Edmonds said. "Students rarely report these incidents as having occurred."And that, meeting organizers said, is why they hope students will make better use of Goucher's "Silent Witness" program. This website enables anyone with knowledge of crimes to report anonymous tips to Public Safety.Public Safety says the form is rarely used. Some students in attendance said they had never even heard of the form."Of course there's a little bit of a conflict here because on the one hand we want to have this information out," President Sanford J. Ungar said. "On the other hand, we don't like want to put it on the front page of the website saying, 'Come to Goucher, we're good at reporting vandalism.'"SGA president Zeke Berzoff-Cohen offered a plan to charge the entire student body to repair damages resulting from vandalism. He said that the students would only be charged for the total cost of repair. When asked if a $1 charge per student -- to pay for something like the destruction of a catering grill -- would be enough to matter to students, Berzoff-Cohen said, "It would add up.""I just think people need to feel like they have a stake in it," he said. "I think the problem is no one has been caught. So, you can have pretty harsh penalties, but unless someone's caught, it doesn't really mean anything."Ungar said that he thinks there is a correlation between "extreme" alcohol consumption and vandalism."There is a level of drinking after which people don't necessarily feel responsible for their actions," Ungar said.While he stopped short of proposing a campus-wide fine for each act of vandalism, Ungar said that students do not feel the effects of vandalism on their wallets."They haven't necessarily put down a security deposit the way they do for apartments," he said. "There's not that sense of personal responsibility that there might be off-campus."While Goucher does charge a room damage deposit, the deposit does not cover vandalism outside of the residence halls.Public Safety asks that anyone with information of vandalism use the Silent Witness form. It is available online: http://www.goucher.edu/x16982.xml."If no one gets blamed as an individual for this, then everyone gets charged," said "Bridging the Gap" president Dan Abrams.