Give Real Reasons

I am writing in response to Chancellor John Silber’s letter to The Daily Free Press regarding the Guest Policy, but first, I would like to thank him for engaging himself in the public forum. It is not often that we see a member of the administration publicly address an issue such as this, and it is nice that the readers of The Daily Free Press can hear the official objections to the proposed policy through other means than the Student Union.

The chancellor began his argument with the claim that the current Guest Policy was originally imposed as an effort to protect the safety of students, and yet the policy fails to perform this function. If the idea is to “allow sufficient time [for the administration] to know who that person is” that students are signing in, why is only one form of identification and the grace of a student required to gain entry into a residence hall? Is the administration so naive as to think that a potential thief or vandal would be balked by these meager measures? Chancellor, I ask you: Is really it so hard to envision ways to bypass our current system? If the goal is to gain the true identity of every guest and the exact duration of his/her visit, no amount of security, short of those that invade our privacy, will suffice. The policy in effect fails to achieve its (overly ambitious) goals and serves now only as a nuisance to those it was enacted to protect.

The chancellor’s second justification was no better than his first. He proposed that the policy serves as some half-baked method of roommate conflict resolution. Claiming that past (more lenient) policies allowed “interruption of students’ study and sleep time by roommates thoughtless enough to bring their sexual partners to the room,” the chancellor wrongly assumes that every guest is invited for the purposes of sex. Certainly, students of this prestigious university have reasons to study or even socialize? Does the administration truly not understand that college students may find the need to invite a study group past midnight? Or, at the very least, host an out-of-control orgy followed by an intense session of pre-exam cramming? The example is exaggerated, but the current policy makes me wonder if the administration understands even that. Chancellor, most of us are not destroying our roommates’ lives with night after night of wild sex, and even if a few are, this University has provided us with countless venues and organized opportunities to resolve conflicts exactly like this. Do you not trust your resident assistants and offices of counseling?

It seems as if these current policies have been created and enforced under the pretenses of goals that cannot be achieved and situations that can be relieved through pre-existing means. Perhaps there were other reasons, but I am at loss to understand them. Perhaps the administration finds some comfort in the fact that I can sleep sex-free at West Campus but am left unmoved by whatever acts are occurring in the “love nests” that are the unguarded apartments of South Campus and Bay State Road. We are under the restrictions of a badly thought-out and unevenly distributed policy. Please, chancellor, give us some real reasons why.