Next year, the University will force all students, except in a handful of extraordinary circumstances, to live on-campus. This change represents another step toward the University’s Master Plan, which will require all students to live in a few large, characterless, University-built dorms.
These changes are hurtful to the students and to the University for many reasons and they need to be reconsidered. Currently, students and Middletown residents (Non-University Personnel, in the tactful jargon of the Administration) live in a symbiotic world as neighbors and landlords. This closeness helps foster good relations and the sense that all of us belong to a community larger than Wesleyan. Forcing students to isolate themselves in dorms on-campus is contradictory to the spirit of integration and will only aggravate the deteriorating relations between campus and community. And let’s not discuss the financial devastation local landlords would incur from the removal of all students from their rental properties.
At the same time, living off-campus allows students to save money. The Administration claims that once all students are assigned on-campus housing, it will consider requests from students in dire financial need for off-campus status so that they will not have to pay the annual $6,000 on-campus housing bill. All students should have the right to shop around to save money, not just those on financial aid. They should also have the right to deal directly with landlords about privacy, pets and other issues rather than simply conform to University regulations.
Finally, it is a huge and much-appreciated convenience for upperclassmen to be able to move in and get settled before the official University-designated move-in date. Off-campus housing also allows students to stay in the same residence for multiple years, which forges stronger relationships between classmates and housemates. It has been found that such bonding leads to increases in alumni donating, an aspiration of any University.
We realize that having all students close together keeps our community tight. Still, segregating students from the greater community while integrating them into the ever-expanding reaches of the Administration needs to be avoided for Wesleyan to maintain its reputation as fostering political awareness and community service.
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