Whether you’ll be spending spring break at home with your friends from high school, in another country with your housemates, or in a thesis carrel with a lot of empty pages to fill, it is probably safe to assume you won’t be reflecting much on policy changes back at Wesleyan. Yet, while we’ve only been back for a little over a month, policies that will alter student life for years to come have been announced.
Tuition at Wesleyan is among the most expensive in the country, and we’re disappointed that the cost of a Wesleyan education will grow another 5.4 percent overall for 2006-2007. While we understand that institutional costs rise each year, we stress that the now-annual five percent raises are unacceptable and cannot happen every year. Increased financial aid would help lighten the burden.
We applaud the WSA’s work on a dining proposal that aims to ensure students good quality and good value while dining on campus. Whether Aramark returns in the fall or a new food service provider sets up shop, we hope that prices will be reasonable. Project $AVE is a wise way to save money as well, as it is a good start toward using student and faculty input to cut institutional financial waste. Taken together, we hope that these measures will translate to money in our own pockets.
While ResLife’s ban of all pets but fish in residential spaces remains controversial among pet owners, we appreciate the addition of a grandfather clause that allows current students on campus with pets to keep them. We maintain that ResLife’s initial “announcement” of the change, which amounted to a few lines buried deep in a housing contract, was misleading, and ResLife also sends students dozens of virtually pointless and near-blank e-mails during the weeks leading up to housing selection. It would have been easy to highlight policy changes in an e-mail, and ResLife should heed this advice for future policy changes.
The decision to furnish all senior woodframe houses for students is an idea that will likely save students some cash in September. On that subject, however, we feel that the $175 fee to remove and store unwanted beds in senior woodframe houses is excessively high. The student suggestion that beds could be stored in house attics is a valid one, and if a house doesn’t have an attic, why not use a neighbor’s attic? Common sense can save a lot of money, and $500 fines for merely entering one’s own basement or attic are unacceptable.
If we can learn anything from the first half of this semester, it is that student input is crucial in to seek when it comes to policy changes.
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