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Opinion

Residence halls aren't what they used to be

Jim McCormick
Opinion Columnist 

Life on campus used to be enjoyable. Not only was the Internet relatively unrestricted in access, but students were generally free to do what they wanted with their space and time on campus. Residents could eat where they wanted, post whatever they wanted on their doors, and student artists were even encouraged to paint the walls in the dorms, as evidenced by the fourth floor of Taub Hall. 

However, this state did not last. Unfortunately, the Residence Halls Association has been rendered impotent against the forces that control residential life.

The decline actually started shortly after Steve Ding left the RHA presidency. At that time, there were a large number of upperclassmen living on campus, and not just in Cougar Place. One of the last things Ding fought for was a common study area on the second floor of Oberholtzer Hall. It served as that kind of space for many years, but of late, the Urban Experience Program wanted to expand its offices. Most people don't know what the Urban Experience Program is, and with good reason. It serves between 30 and 60 students, not all of whom live on campus. The group's last presentation to the Student Fees Advisory Committee was lacking in information on what they do. However, this group got their way once Ding left, taking away what had been a popular common study area among residents.

There also used to be far more freedom in when and where residents could eat. Sure, Chartwells had lousy food -- worse than the current fare by far, but at least you could get to a convenience store when you wanted to, or eat at the University Center or UC Satellite. Also, they once used a declining debit system for meal plans, which was far superior to the current system, in which there is no flexibility.

There are only 5 meal plan options offered now, none of which are right for many residents. The old system was far more adequate for a campus like UH. It allowed more options and freedom, which are two things residents demand but are not getting. Furthermore, when students complained about major service problems with Chartwells, changes were made on a permanent basis, not just for a couple of weeks.

You generally knew what you were getting with a Chartwells meal. Under Aramark the menu options are more creative, but that's not always a good thing. Pasta and meat sauce is entirely unobtainable, at least properly done as it was under the old regime. An entree that confused a few Towers' diners consisted of sweet potatoes, bacon bits, squash, zucchini and broccoli. And since when was broccoli an acceptable pizza topping? Sometimes, creativity is a good thing. But honestly, the people designing these dishes should not be allowed to deviate from a standard cookbook.

Internet access used to be much more acceptable as well. Currently, streaming video is unwatchable from a campus connection, which has been throttled to 50 kilobytes per second. This causes a system update to take eight hours to download -- seven more hours than it should, and seven more hours that a system is rendered useless.

Sure, BitTorrent is a bad idea, as two students alone could and would suck up the entire campus's bandwidth. However, throttling a Web connection is not acceptable or required to provide quality of service. What's worse is that the Edgewall system in place is quite pointless, as it requires a room key to get on to the dorm network, which is proof enough that a person is an authorized network user. Instead, it just interferes with resident Internet activity for no valid reason.

Lastly, residents are charged for laundry, which is a practice that has fallen by the wayside at other universities. The laundry rooms are not always properly maintained, with broken lint traps on the dryers and inconsistent service from the washing machines. If an authorization system is necessary to keep outsiders from doing their laundry in residence halls, at least make it so that residents aren't paying for the necessity of clean clothes.

Campus life has been better, and retention rates show it: four years ago, the number of upperclassmen still living in the dorms was much higher than it is today. What residents need is more activism from RHA. For that to happen, residents actually need to attend the general assembly meetings regularly and vent their frustrations repeatedly. Though throwing one nut at the heads of an unresponsive system may not change things, a lot of nuts thrown on a repeated basis will get lasting attention.

McCormick, a computer science post-baccalaureate student, 
can be reached via dccampus@mail.uh.edu