Policy Treats Us Like Children

John Silber’s letter in Monday’s Daily Free Press about the current Guest Policy perfectly portrays the faulty attitude that lies behind the overly strict rules that govern those of us who dorm at Boston University. Chancellor Silber gives two reasons for the current Guest Policy. The first reason is student safety. “If a student wishes to pass a nonstudent in to a dormitory, we want sufficient time to know who that person is and to ensure that the student recommending entry knows the proposed guest personally.” Well John, what if a student wishes to pass a fellow BU student into a dormitory? If that fellow BU student is staying overnight or even just hanging out later than 1 a.m., she still needs to get approval in advance, or the fellow student can enter before 8 p.m. as long as she doesn’t leave the dorm again all night, or they can misuse the privilege of study extensions, as long as the fellow student leaves by 8 AM. And if the fellow student isn’t on a dining plan because she lives off campus, as Silber suggests we all should, there is no getting around the need for advance approval just to have a BU student hang out in another student’s room one night.

The second reason Silber gives, and the one he spends the majority of his letter discussing, is to prevent thoughtless roommates from having their sexual partners over. When the policy was changed to make such events less plausible, there were many “sighs of relief from students who were silent about their dissatisfaction with the old policies.” So basically, the current policy was instated so that students who are too shy to bring up their discomforts to their roommates could continue on without having to deal with problems they encounter. While we thank you for the thought, John, we’d rather learn to interact with others than have a Guest Policy that treats us like children.

Underlying Silber’s already faulty argument is the fact that it not only assumes that every member of the opposite sex we have over in our room is our sexual partner, but that the only people we have stay in our rooms overnight are members of the opposite sex at all. I have had two overnight guests this semester, and both were female friends of mine from high school who came to visit me for the weekend. And what if I want to have a male friend stay over? Well, when parents complained that their daughters needed to get hotel rooms in order to have their boyfriends stay over for the weekend, John Silber did not take the complaints seriously. Which makes sense since according to a sheet of paper given to me with my 2001-2002 Lifebook, the Guest Policy is based on the fact that “to have a guest or visitor is a privilege not a right.” Clearly, our Guest Policy is not based on the fact that my dorm is my place of residence that I am paying for, and I should therefore have the right to have people over to my dorm. The Commonwealth of Massachusetts thinks that I am adult enough and that I live in Boston for a large enough percentage of my year that I had the responsibility to serve jury duty last week and the capability to decide the fate of others. But John Silber and the BU administration don’t seem to consider me enough of an adult to be capable of even handling my own social problems, or enough of a resident of my own dorm to have the right to have guests and visitors. Funny how out of the courtroom I was sent to with maybe 50 other potential jurors, at least three others were BU students.

There are many aspects of our Guest Policy that really create a safe campus. Of course a non-BU student should have to be signed in by a resident of the dorm and present a form of identification. But requiring me to fill out a form 24-hours in advance if my friend wants to stay over, not allowing a member of the opposite sex to stay in my room, and not allowing visitors after 1 a.m. on weekdays and 2:30 a.m. on weekends is just silly. There are also many holes in the policy, like the fact that a BU student who is not on a meal plan has to be signed in to a BU dorm. Revisions need to be made to our current policy. But a new policy will only work if the attitudes behind it reflect a respect for BU students. The current policy is based on faulty assumptions and on a confusion of social conflicts with student safety. But I have a feeling that even John Silber knows that there are problems with the current BU Guest Policy. Why else would he close his letter by suggesting that we all take advantage of the option of moving off campus? If you are so confident in the current policy, John, you should stand behind the idea of living in a BU dormitory.