The Office of Housing somehow accomplishes the feat of being quite possibly the most disliked and hardest to deal with part of all the unpopular bureaucracy at Boston University. While providing housing for more than 10,000 students is a formidable task with countless logistical problems, better long-term planning and more consideration for students’ needs could help alleviate problems like those experienced by the over 470 students who lived in Cambridge hotels this year.
BU provides its students a great service by guaranteeing housing for all four years as long as students stay on campus. Many other schools fail to make similar promises, especially ones located in the heart of cities with tight housing. Of course, fulfilling this promise is difficult, and BU has come up short on housing for freshman during the past several years.
This fall, the university handled the situation reasonably well, housing the students in the Cambridge Radisson and Hyatt Regency hotels. In exchange for paying regular price to live across the river, the students got to enjoy the non-academic environment of cable television, and BU set up special Crystal Transport shuttles for the freshmen.
Most of the freshmen have moved into regular dorms now, but about 130 still live at the Hyatt. Though the Office of Housing hopes to have them out soon, these students must live in limbo until then. Students can’t expect to know exactly where they will live, but BU should work to be as specific as possible about when they will move because moving mid-month already disrupts these students’ abilities to sleep and study.
At the hotels, many of the freshmen created a traditional social environment, but now they must go wherever space opens up, often with a new roommate. The freshmen are usually living away from home for the first time, and in exchange for what they have put up with so far, BU should give them the option of staying in the hotel. At the very least, BU could have asked students if they liked living there on the questionnaires they used for students to rank building preferences and moved those who most wanted to live on campus first.
Ideally, housing problems caused by misjudging the freshman class size will end when the new part of the Student Village Project opens in 2005. But the university must continue to ensure its long-term planning makes housing for freshmen a priority while maintaining their promise of housing for all students.