Violating students’ privacy rights

I am an outraged student who wishes to publicize to the Boston University community and the general public my concerns with the way Boston University students are blatantly and unjustly mistreated.

On Oct. 11, I was awakened by my roommate who was on her way home to visit her family for Columbus Day weekend. She said to me, ‘Tracy, I hear a drip, check it out and call maintenance or something.’ So when I woke up, I called the maintenance department to report a leak that we had in the center of our ceiling. The next thing that I knew, a bunch of random middle-aged workers were coming in and out of our room as they pleased and entertaining us by proposing various theories on the ever-increasing leakage problem. For six days, we lived with buckets and garbage bags in the center of our floor, making it extremely inconvenient to navigate around the room without employing some sort of strategic planning. It eventually got to the point where our ceiling was crumbling and yellowing, looking more like something out of a sci-fi film than the friendly stucco plaster it had once pretended to be. When it began to fall onto our beds in the middle of the night, that’s when we knew BU had to actually do something about the leak.

Eventually we were forced to move out at a moment’s notice to an isolated location on West Campus, far away from our homey 575 Commonwealth Ave. dorm. We dragged our hastily-packed luggage all the way down to West Campus with no offer of assistance from the people who were forcing us to move out. Most importantly, we had been told that none of our stuff that remained in our room would be moved or damaged, since it would all be covered up once the work actually began.

So there we slept, night after night in the unheated room in Rich Hall, without our own computers and with midterms upon us, while the workers carefully avoided damage to our property and worked on our ceiling or so we thought. In actuality, when we returned to our room five days later, we were horrified at what we found: none of the items in our room were in the same place as we had left them. All of our desk items had been removed and stuffed into bags, each one of us had random stuff scattered in our drawers that didn’t belong there, and our dressers, beds and desks had all been moved. Also, our computers, computer accessories and printers had been stored in the bathtub for a number of days and were then haphazardly placed in random places.

It was obvious that not only had we been lied to about our stuff being moved around, but that our inherent right to privacy had been violated; drawers had been opened and their private contents had been handled, jewelry and other valuables had been shoved into random places, and the workers exhibited complete lack of respect for the our property. Not only was the face of my roommate’s expensive watch extremely scratched, but there is a scratch in my new, flat-screen computer monitor as well.

It must be recognized by Boston University that students are people too. We have rights and voices which we are not afraid to use to champion these rights and express outrage at the treatment we have received. While we lived in blissful ignorance on West Campus, strangers whom we had been forced to trust were going through our belongings, moving them around and risking damage to them. Yes, our ceiling is fine now, but that does not change the fact that BU has no problem with violating its students’ basic rights and treating them with disturbing amounts of disrespect.