GS Students Lack Housing, Cite Inequality

If you have ever been in Butler Library at four in the morning and seen students curled up between two chairs, there is a chance they were not there simply to study—they might be living there.

Housing is a constant issue for students at the School of General Studies, who are not universally guaranteed accommodations by the University. Those who are provided with housing have been subject to rent hikes in recent years, according to the school’s University Senators who are calling for reforms to current housing policies.

“There has been a lot of hubbub lately from GS and graduate students about the lack of services and housing that they receive,” said Paige Lampkin, GS ’08 and cochair of the University Senate’s Housing Committee.

Last week, the University Senate passed a resolution calling on the administration to establish a concrete policy for raising rents in University housing units. The Senate hopes to hold a hearing at the end of the month to further address the issue.

The hearing will be intended “not to aggravate people, but to highlight that there is an issue, and if there is an issue, to figure out how we can solve it,” Lampkin said. The hearing will ideally be held before the next University Senate plenary meeting on Feb. 29, and if not, then before spring break. Panelists and speakers have not been chosen yet.
Part of the “hubbub” that Lampkin described arose from the fact that two students actually did live in Butler last semester.

There are several situations that might land one in such a situation. For Shlomo Neuman, a GS student who lived in Butler, it was a combination of his status as a transfer student and bad luck with a sublet apartment.

University Apartment Housing, which is responsible for GS and graduate student housing, gives continuing students lower priority than new students. “Within each group, applicants are housed based upon the date and time that their application was submitted,” UAH Communications Director Dan Held said.

“I personally think it is wrong,” Neuman said of the preferential treatment given to new students. “We are already here, we won’t go anywhere, and we will stay here—but new students won’t come [if they don’t receive housing], so they give priority to the new students.”

Neuman applied for housing at the beginning of his second semester at GS and was placed on the waiting list. “You can wait like four years, basically,” he said. His wait list number was in the 20s, but he never received housing—even though he knew others with wait list numbers in the 70s who were granted housing before him.

Held maintained that no students received any unfair advantage in the process. “Students do not get preferential treatment based on ‘connections,’” he said. “However, because the availability of different types of units varies, the different wait lists move at different rates.”

This semester, all new GS students and “a number of continuing students” were granted housing off the waiting list, Held said. Yet in Butler, at four in the morning, one often can still find a person or two curled up between two chairs—and according to Neuman, there’s a good bet they are from General Studies.

“We pay crazy tuition—we need housing,” Neuman said.

shane.ferro@columbiaspectator.com