All those single men on campus who spend night after night longing for a girl to share their meals, their beds or their lives should really be taking some cues from Boston University Chancellor John Silber and his administration.
Sure, at first glance, compared to many of the men on campus, Chancellor Silber seems like the conventional high school underdog from Anywhere, USA who gets picked on in gym class, stuffed in lockers and rejected by pretty girls.
Yet while he may be a bit past his dating prime — he’s a 75-year-old, happily married husband and father — and despite his long, somewhat infamous public career — he’s been characterized as everything from a well-reputed professor, to a reporter-strangling gubernatorial candidate, to BU’s self-proclaimed personal savior — Chancellor Silber really does have a way with the ladies and thousands of barely legal women are practically banging down his door to get in.
That is, with Chancellor Silber teaching the arts of seduction to his admissions officers in that sultry Grecian lair on Bay State Road, and with Silber paving the way as the head Cassanova of Boston University, admissions at BU have skyrocketed. More women (and some, but not enough, men) than ever are finding themselves enticed by Boston University.
Through the combined efforts of BU public relations officers, faculty members, administrators and Silber himself, potential students are tempted by tours led down the immaculate, well-landscaped Bay State Road by admissions officers with green coats, big smiles and good balance. They are teased with beautifully collated, extra-glossy admissions catalogues and tantalized by promises of beautiful dorms, a low student-teacher ratio and restaurant-quality dining halls.
But alas, seduction only goes so far. Even the most amazing love affairs fizzle and even the most amazing lovers cease to satisfy. Eventually, we all wake up one morning completely alone with an empty bottle of wine, a bad hangover and dirty sheets.
For freshmen, this short-lived love affair with Boston University ends once they move onto the BU campus. Resigned to Warren Towers or South Campus, the weathered beauty of Bay State Road becomes merely a memory drifting between the cinderblock walls of their cramped freshman quarters — and the palatial, high-life of the Student Village becomes an unattainable mirage spanning across years of potentially bad upperclassman housing.
Most horrifying, however, is that some freshmen have found themselves banished to the “other side of the river:” the Memorial Drive campus of Boston University, where students are sentenced to spend their first year in a cloistered world of shuttle buses, no dining halls and long treks to campus.
As nice as the Hyatt or the Radisson are, I doubt BU admissions officers prominently display them next to the pictures of the remodeled West Campus dining hall or the new student village. And though BU has tried to make its ostracized freshmen feel welcome (the students enjoy the benefits of maid services, cable television and swimming pools and for the past few months, RAs have made an extra effort to organize “dorm” activities and help freshmen meet each other) in the spirit of true BU bureaucracy, nothing good ever lasts. While the students at the Radisson and the Hyatt have finally adapted to their unconventional housing and started to make friends, BU has ordered them to move. Next semester the students can expect to be scattered throughout campus.
Many of the students living in the Radisson and the Hyatt are outraged at having to pack up their things, leave their friends, adjust to new roommates and move to a completely different residence for the second half of their freshman year. The Radisson Residence Hall Association president has even begun a petition in hopes to stop the administration from forcing freshmen who enjoy their current living situation and roommates from relocating.
While I find it completely ridiculous that BU would house freshmen so far away from campus in the first place, I think it is even more outrageous that the housing department would “force” students to move after their first semester.
Freshman year is the time to meet the people who will be your friends for the rest of college and a time to learn how to adjust to classes and manage a college course load. It’s a time to spend hours talking with your roommate, hanging out with the people on your floor, terrorizing your RA and experimenting with frosting. Forcing students to move to a new floor with a new roommate halfway through the year robs them of these and many other integral aspects of the freshman year experience.
Granted, it is probably costing Boston University a fortune to house students in a hotel like the Hyatt, which rents for upwards of $200 dollars per night. But is it really fair for BU to expect those well-adjusted, perfectly happy hotel residents to relocate?
Furthermore, there may be a housing crisis on campus, but BU could have done something better besides shuttling a few hundred freshmen across the river. I’m sure the many sophomores and juniors stuck in Warren Towers or West Campus for their second or third years would have gladly accepted bigger rooms and cable television, despite the long walk.
Undoubtedly, the Memorial Drive freshmen are justified in their disappointment with Boston University, but I doubt their petition and strong feelings will outweigh cost-effectiveness and sway the BU bean counters. If anything, the freshmen should learn that the BU administration is nothing more than a merciless lover who doesn’t care and keeps moving on and who, more importantly, has a new crop of future freshmen to seduce and thousands of glossy pamphlets to mail.