Staff Editorial |Reslife should take measures to eliminate confusion for students

During the bustle of the housing and room draw season, students received more e-mails from the Office of Residential Life than in previous years. Students were informed via e-mail of everything ranging from house draw numbers to the number of students drawing into wellness corridors to fire code violations in senior apartments. The Office of Residential Life has attempted to increase transparency so that students have a better understanding of housing processes. But after several recent problems with the execution of its policies, it seems that their new system has flaws that should be avoided in the coming years.

For example, 17 women applied to transfer into Strong House this year and were initially approved over the weekend of April 21. But several days later, students received an e-mail from the Office stating that after further consideration, the applicants had been denied the housing change, because the Office miscalculated the number of rooms that would have to be converted into doubles if more people were accommodated in Strong.

These students then had to draw into their own houses before they could apply to transfer, at which point they could be approved or rejected depending on the number of incoming freshmen. Ironically, this is Residential Life’s current policy for transferring into another dorm. Unfortunately, the policy was not followed from the outset when these students first applied to Strong, and thus the process became muddled.

The confusion with policies was also apparent during senior apartment draw. With only 549 spaces available in the Terrace Apartments, Town Houses and South Commons, and approximately 650 rising seniors, Residential Life made suites in Main Building and Jewett House available for the first time during apartment draw. Only when no seniors opted for these nine suites were they entered into regular housing draw.

However, the process to draw into a suite in Main versus one in Jewett or Josselyn differed. In other dorms, students had to first apply with their intended roommates to get permission to draw into suites, and then the groups whose members were currently residents of the dorm had priority. Main’s suite draw, on the other hand, deviated from this process. Suites were drawn based on class seniority, which allowed seniors living outside of Main to draw suites first, rather than on the system of draw numbers and previous residency within the dorm. The disparate processes left some students understandably frustrated and wondering whether Residential Life was consistently following their own policies.

While the process of room draw may have left some baffled, other areas of Residential Life are overly transparent. Although the Office of Residential Life said that e-mails containing student information such as draw numbers or residential violations only use students’ identification numbers and not their names, this was not the case in some of the e-mails that students received. This information has become easily accessible to the wider student body, and foregrounds the need for a discussion of privacy. Privacy is clearly not well-served by mass e-mails.

The Office of Residential Life would benefit from refocusing their commitment to improved communication and transparency. One way to do this would be to abandon the practice of sending multiple shotgun e-mails to students unless they are urgent, and to streamline housing updates into fewer, strategically timed notices that students could expect in the weeks prior to pivotal housing events. The Office of Residential Life could also hold a week of open office hours for students with questions about the process. But above and beyond revising methods of communication, Residential Life must consistently follow their own policies.

The Staff Editorial represents a two-thirds majority of the 21-member Editorial Board.