Could University administrators soon be Herget Hall’s newest residents?
They would be if it were up to me. If some of our administrators truly feel comfortable forcing a freshmen residency requirement onto the University’s newest faces, then they should be forced to live in the dorms for a year. I doubt they would last two weeks.
Perhaps I am slightly hypocritical. The only place I have ever lived on campus is East Campus Apartments, which is restricted for upperclassmen. ECA is a far cry from my friends’ nightmarish dorm rooms with leaky ceilings and disgusting hall bathrooms their freshman year. One tour of on-campus housing for freshmen should prove living in those dorms should be a choice, not a requirement.
According to Steven Waller, the Director of Residential Life, the issue has been submitted to the Board of Supervisors and is expected to be on their October agenda. If approved as is, the requirement would be enforced by the fall of 2009. To dispel a common belief, Waller said, “The freshmen residency requirement is not a Department of Residential Life initiative. It is a University initiative to advance the National Flagship Agenda … The Flagship Agenda has established goals for retention and graduation rates and the freshmen residency requirement is intended to support those goals and is just one of the initiatives to help the University reach its goals.” Although the department did not initiate the requirement, Waller confirmed that Residential Life does support the initiative.
The University argues that other regional universities have similar requirements, resulting in the tremendous academic success the University hopes to achieve by instating its own requirement. What our administrators fail to tell you is many of those universities have state-of-the-art facilities. In a January presentation to the Faculty Senate, the University provided a list of institutions that already have requirements, including Loyola University, Tulane University and the University of South Carolina. I lived on campus at Loyola in the fall of 2006 and have visited the dorms at Tulane and USC. They put ours to shame. The dorms provide reasonable, modern accommodations, and many have private bathrooms. I will admit my dorm at Loyola was not the nicest living arrangement available. My single room with ample storage space and free laundry facilities, however, made living on campus much more comfortable than an experience in Kirby-Smith or East Laville would be. In addition, I never had to worry about finding a parking spot close to my dorm because there were parking garages with enough space for residents and commuters.
Many of the University’s residence halls have not changed significantly since my parents were here in the 1970s, but the rates for living in these halls have. The proposed 2007-2008 housing rates for all four aforementioned universities are similar, even though LSU students are receiving less amenities and inadequate living conditions. In addition, according to Yahoo! Real Estate, the cost of living in Baton Rouge, New Orleans, and Columbia, S.C., in their respective universities’ zip codes are all within 12 points of each other. If the cost of living is comparable in all three cities and the cost of living on-campus at all four universities is comparable, then why are University students paying as much as the other universities’ students when we are not receiving the same accommodations?
If the Board of Supervisors approves this requirement, the University will no longer have to compete with the cost of off-campus rent. The Department of Residential Life will not have any incentive to listen to freshmen’s complaints because there will be no other options available to them. Many landlords must at least attempt to comply with the tenants’ wishes or lose business. But the University will have total control of where many tenants live and no incentive to enhance their facilities.
The University is renovating many of the dorms, and I applaud their efforts. It is too premature, however, to require freshmen to live on campus when most dorms have yet to be refurbished. No one wants to live in a place that is being renovated, and I do not think it is the best way to welcome freshmen to the University. Why would potential students want to come here and live in a construction zone when they could easily go to a nearby university and receive a similar education while living in better accommodations? The current conditions of many of the dorms and the amenities that come with on-campus living do not help our University reach the high standards of the Flagship Agenda. A better time for the debate to be reintroduced would be after the renovations are complete. After all, how can the freshmen make those good grades the University brags about on-campus students receiving when noise from the construction interrupts their studying time?
—-Contact Laura Bratcher at [email protected]