One of the administration’s greatest initiatives is its commitment to providing class appropriate on-campus housing for all students. While most other colleges that require students to live on-campus for all four years only offer dorms, Wesleyan is unique in that it also offers houses and apartments so that upperclassmen do not have to live in dorms if they don’t want to.
While there have been rumors that the administration will eliminate senior houses in the future and build a new senior dorm, current evidence indicates otherwise. ResLife has added more senior houses, additional bedrooms in older senior woodframes, and more class appropriate housing for sophomores.
Despite these efforts to provide a variety of housing options for students, more students than ever are applying for off-campus housing. Some students have qualms with the fact that the University makes it difficult to apply for off-campus housing, while others claim that they have the right to pursue housing that is not as expensive as the University’s. According to the article about off-campus housing on the front page of today’s Argus, Paolo Speirn ’10 felt that the University is too invasive with room Fire Safety searches, and thus students should be able to find off-campus housing if they object to this policy.
While these are valid claims, all incoming Wesleyan students know that they will be required to live on-campus for their entire undergraduate careers, so it’s odd that they would choose to object to this school policy now. As for the issues of invasiveness, this is not really a complaint about housing options, but about school policy.
As ResLife Director Fran Koerting put it, there is not much “offered off-campus that you can’t get [on-campus],” especially since, on campus, maintenance is taken care of, there are no landlords to deal with, and, overall, “there’s so much more protection built into [on-campus housing] should something go wrong.”
Those students who have objections to on-campus housing and do not have special living concerns should work with ResLife instead of fighting to live off-campus, and remember that the administration’s dedication to providing a variety of housing options for the entire student community is a privilege.
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