Warren Towers residents are used to complaining about the ways their living conditions are less than perfect — and rightfully so.
But students who have just moved into the University of Massachusetts Boston’s new dormitories are experiencing standards of living that most of us can’t imagine. Elevators have dropped several floors like something out of Disney’s “Tower of Terror.” The toilets malfunction, the showers are frigid and the food is sometimes raw.
The 1,077 students who live in the dorm are paying between $9,000 and $12,000, not including $5,390 per year for meals, to live in conditions that can’t be considered humane. These students are at the mercy of the administration — the school is Boston’s only public university, and it’s a majority-minority school. It’s home to students who may not be able to find their own off-campus housing.
The UMass administration doesn’t seem to care to address student concerns, giving empty promises only when confronted by journalists. When The Boston Globe looked into the situation, the interim chancellor promised to investigate, though she has most likely been aware of the situation for the past two months. Residents said their complaints have not amounted to any action from the administration.
Only when the Globe starts sniffing their noses around campus does the administration say it cares about student wellbeing. Are they waiting for a lawsuit before they deal with these problems?
This points to a greater issue — college officials know that students are at their mercy when it comes to housing. While no BU elevator has ever dropped several floors, and we don’t have strangers sleeping in our common rooms overnight, our elevators are often malfunctioning. Our showers are often cold. We pay thousands of dollars a year for conditions that are often less than ideal, and petitioning for change seems out of our hands.
The dorm is operated by a private company, Capstone Development, that will own the building for the next 40 years. UMass needs to hold this company accountable now to fix these issues and lay the groundwork for a fully functioning dorm, so that years down the line these conditions do not become normal.
UMass officials have said, according to the Globe, that allowing students to live on campus will improve academic performance — the school is trying to improve its current (for freshmen) 48 percent graduation rate. But students can’t focus on academics when they can hardly shower or eat.
Boston and its surrounding area is full of private schools — Boston University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Harvard University — that are elite and expensive. The city needs public colleges that aren’t just for commuter students, and attaching dorms to UMass Boston’s campus has made that a possibility. But seeing as these dorms aren’t liveable, out-of-town students will be forced to either transfer or accept that their college experience will be miserable.
Boston is known as America’s college town. The city cannot boast about its educational prowess if it doesn’t provide options for public higher education. UMass Boston is a rare contrast to the city’s elite private institutions, and it finally has its moment to shine, but students would do better to commute than live in a residence they paid thousands of dollars for.
The fact that this is happening at a public school and not a private school highlights the gap we have in income, priorities and safety standards across the city — in every industry and now in education. In a city with so many high-performing schools, the one public school we currently have cannot meet basic performance requirements. It sets the precedent that unless you’re wealthy enough to live here, you can’t learn here.
CORRECTION: A previous version of this editorial incorrectly gendered UMass Boston’s interim chancellor, and has since been corrected. An updated version reflects this correction.
I am a UMass Boston student and resident, and I can say that the Boston Globe article was disgustingly overblown and errant. I, for one, have had a fantastic experience so far here with the dorm conditions. While the elevator failure is unforgivable, the university is not at fault. Capstone Development, the company that owns the building, is, and has addressed the problem. The security issue is made up, the problems with the food are present at virtually every university and are the fault of Sodexo, the company which runs the cafeteria system at UMass Boston and most of the prisons and universities in the area. The problems with water heating and plumbing are an issue that was addressed weeks ago, and are to be expected with a brand new building. I have heard musings from a well-respected professor at the school that the report to the Boston Globe about conditions at the residence halls were likely given by a group of faculty dissatisfied with the raise in parking prices.