Let Us Prove Our Maturity

Chancellor Silber, it is after much deliberation that I sit down to write this response to your letter from March 18, 2002. I do not want to start another debate over a topic so familiar and often argued over as the University Guest Policy; however, I hope you take your time to read it and pause to think over it from our point of view. We, the students, definitely tried to do you the same courtesy.

First of all, it is not all about sex. In fact, most of us are dissatisfied with the Guest Policy for reasons that have nothing to do with sex and more to do with the frustration the policy creates when it comes to mundane everyday activities such as studying and getting late night snacks. But since you mentioned rampant sexual lives of students as one of the reasons for the implementation of the current Guest Policy, I would like to note that as a resident of one of the Bay State Road brownstones, I have yet to witness the disruptive and inconsiderate rabbit-like sexual activity that is sure to take place should the administration yield one inch to the requests of the Student Union. As you and I and most of the student body know, the opportunity for unrestricted sexual encounters exists in the brownstones, but I have yet to find myself forced out of the room or hear of such an incident from someone else. It appears that despite the administration’s assumption of an average BU student’s incapability to communicate with his or her roommate and reach a compromise acceptable to both parties, we manage to resolve our conflicts in a civilized adult manner. Could it be that we have reached an age when we no longer require a babysitter?

In your letter, you state the first reason for the current Guest Policy’s coming into existence was the necessity to ensure student safety and should a student want to “pass a non student into a dormitory, we want sufficient time to know who that person is and to ensure that the student…knows the proposed guest personally.” The waiting period, however, does not accomplish that — unless you are running background checks on every single one of the guests, and as we learned in the last few months, not even the governmental intelligence agencies manage to do that. The policy allows me to sign in a non-student into the dormitory at 11:55 without the thorough background check (which of course will take place and will be done by a qualified work-study student, should the application be submitted to the local ORL office one working day in advance), but it assumes the same person will be a grave danger to me and my neighbors should I want to pass him or her into the dormitory five minutes later than 12 a.m. Who are we kidding, really? You forgot, or chose to ignore the fact that the current Guest Policy does not discriminate between students and non-students in their access to the dormitories past dinner time, and under the current rules, I have as much access to the Towers music room and vending machines as my friend does from, let’s say, Tufts. The only difference between us is that I am paying for room and board here at BU, and she isn’t.

I do not believe that the University is in business, as you crudely put it in your letter, to “provide weekend love nests,” but it should not deny the students their right to access the facilities. In fact, I did not realize that the University was in business; in my naive perception, I thought it was an institution of higher learning dedicated to nurturing intellectual growth of its students, which suffers when they are denied access to facilities necessary for completion of their work. As far as your statistics on the student opinion of the Guest Policy, I suggest you take a look at the data compiled by the Student Union, who worked very hard to survey a large portion of the students and parents. When an overwhelming majority of the students TODAY are unhappy with the existing policy, the fact that your data from years ago when the policy was first implemented is irrelevant. If you are dedicated to making our college experience one of intellectual and academic growth, you must allow us to grow and stop being an overbearing parent; all you are teaching us now is that we are incapable of making any decisions for ourselves. We have the most stringent guest policy among all the Boston area schools, including our neighbors Northeastern, located in a very similar setting (possibly less safe), MIT and Harvard; it is amazing to me that you perceive us to be less capable to be rational about our safety then any of the students at these schools. Please take your pride in the intellectual ability of the student body, picked from the crËme of the crop via careful selection based on reasoning tests, essays and such, and treat us as the intelligent bunch you always remind us we are. We won’t let you down.