Room For Improvements

That Columbia is strapped for space is an accepted fact of student life. But that Columbia's current system for booking student space is rife with inefficiencies is a matter that can and should be addressed. The University should centralize the process for reserving space, expand pre-calendaring, and penalize groups that fail to utilize reserved spaces to blunt the edge of the space crunch.

At present, a number of different departments—among them University Event Management, the University Registrar, and Columbia University Information Technology—control the allocation of rooms designated for student use. The need for cooperation among so many offices makes the process unwieldy. Although students file classroom-space requests with UEM, UEM must then communicate with the Registrar to secure space. E-classrooms—rooms fitted with electronic equipment—fall under the separate purview of CUIT. Students also complain that officials are unresponsive to their questions and inconsistent in sending out timely space confirmations—no great surprise, since precious few members of the UEM staff are devoted to managing space reservations. On the student side, groups that book space in Lerner Hall a semester in advance through the pre-calendaring system inadvertently aggravate the space crunch when they reserve unnecessary rooms. Because Lerner pre-calendaring is the only way to plan ahead, sparsely attended board meetings appropriate for Hamilton classrooms end up occupying prime Lerner real estate. In the same vein, student groups sometimes neglect to cancel rooms they reserved months in advance but no longer need, again wasting valuable space.
Such inefficiencies can be redressed by more collaboration between space-booking departments and Columbia and Barnard. The University should create a centralized space-reservation system, with a single Web site where students would be able to book space anywhere on either campus by submitting only one request. Under a consolidated system, departments at both Columbia and Barnard could work together by pooling available buildings and assigning rooms that match groups' needs. To increase communication between departments and make the system more accessible, the University should hire more personnel to deal with the complexities of scheduling.

Pre-calendaring, too, is a process that can be improved. The Registrar should reconsider its policy whereby student groups cannot reserve academic classrooms until the start of each semester. Though class scheduling rightly takes priority, most clubs meet only after 9 p.m., by which time the vast majority of classes have already ended, or on weekends, when no classes are scheduled at all. Broadening pre-calendaring to include these time slots and classrooms would make for more efficient allocation of space. Moreover, UEM should draft written policies on space registration, prioritization of space requests, and response times for space confirmations. Doing so would provide useful information for students and administrators alike and enable students to lodge complaints more easily when policies are violated. With such a document readily available, the administration could enforce its rules more stringently when groups fail to cancel unnecessary reservations.

In the past few months, UEM has reached out to student leaders in an effort to determine student groups' primary concerns and find ways to address them. The administration should be commended for taking the first step in reaching out to students for feedback, but it must follow through beyond this semester. More communication between departments, more pre-calendaring options, and the creation of a regulated system with a central Web site are sensible next steps. With Barnard's new student center under construction, the space crunch is being felt more keenly than ever before. New space is hard to come by, but the administration should at least fix the core inefficiencies of the present system.