Hate

I Hate University Housing

Does living in the dorms suck? Does the pope wear a funny hat?

The toothy, well-compensated idiots enjoying their comfy, large rooms portrayed in the University Housing brochure belie the reality of dorm life. Of course, that is a genius display of public relations claptrap that wisely fails to note that the dorms are festering, overpriced death traps. Overstatement? Yes, if you don't count the $600 monthly bill for a tiny room, asbestos, fickle plumbing, unreliable heat and noxious paint. Though wear-and-tear and frequent fire drills are only indirectly the fault of University Housing, the dormitory is nonetheless a deliriously awful place to sleep, study, or eat. Housing touts the dorms, or rather residence halls, as having four distinct advantages over off-campus living: cost, community, convenience, and as a quiet place to study. How very, very wrong they are on all counts.

On its website, Housing says the Office of Financial Aid estimates the average off-campus student pays $5,350 in rent for the academic year. Not surprisingly, Housing casually mentions that the cost of living in the dorms this year is exactly $5,350, including food and internet service. Over nine months, this works out to a monthly $594. A perusal of the rental ads in the Ol' Dirty Emerald shows the average Eugene apartment costs about $350 per person, far from the University's biased estimate. That's cost shot down: the cost is almost twice as great to live on-campus than it is to get an apartment. Plus, the dorms include surprise charges. If some jerk decides to steal the couch from your lounge and they don't catch said jerk, the damage bill is split amongst all the residents of the floor.

Housing also features exclusive long distance phone service, which means that when calling your parents to damn them for making you live in on-campus, it'll cost you a not-very-competitive 15 cents-per-minute - and you can't sign up for a cheaper plan. Housing also claims that their facilities are conveniently located to the University's resources, by which they mean lecture halls and the EMU. Yes, the dorms are closer than anywhere to lecture halls, but only if you live in Earl. You are just as far away from PLC or Deady in an apartment as you would be if you lived in Hamilton, Bean, Walton, Riley, University Inn, or Family Housing, which is so remote that they've had trouble getting OPS to come out there.

But above all else, Housing stresses the precious community the residents of the dorm create. Community would be involuntary and wonderful if Housing were able to make their mission statement a reality:

"The terms residence hall and dorm are often used interchangeably, yet the University of Oregon recognizes a significant difference between the two. The term dorm originates from the Latin word dormitus, meaning to sleep. An important objective of residence halls at the UO is to provide not just a place to sleep, but also opportunities for personal and educational growth. At the University of Oregon, you'll be living in a residence hall, not a dorm." (http://housing.uoregon.edu/on_campus/onfaq.html)

Contrary to what they say, the purpose of the dorms is to sleep, not to build community. That goal is contrived and unattainable. People do not automatically form a community with the people they've been randomly chosen to live with, so Housing has to force community down our throats with immature, uninteresting hall activities. These fall along the spectrum from Movie Night to Finger-Painting Night to Theatre Night. Not counting the same five nerds who do each and every blasted thing their hall offers (Don't these people study?), nobody wants to participate. For instance, my dorm planned a trip to go see Julius Caesar at the Robinson and even offered discounted tickets. Almost nobody signed up, the tickets had to be whored away at the last minute for a buck and change. Events are planned and executed by Resident Assistants (RAs), who are as young, naive and fractious as the residents they are charged with keeping in line. Their utter lack of interest in enforcing noise rules makes the dorms impossible to sleep or study in. Sure, there are academic and 24-hour quiet halls, but the dorm specification is only as good as the RA that lives there, and a lot of RAs are not very good. If your RA doesn't feel like enforcing the rules, then your specification means nothing. Somehow, during the lengthy RA selection and training processes, Housing never quite realizes that most RA candidates are incompetent, unstable drunks who only signed up for the free room and board.

There are exactly two ways to form a lasting bond with your hallmates. First: take up smoking. There's always some cool people hanging out in the designated smoking area. They might even bum you a cigarette, if you're cool enough. Second: attend those infernal weekly hall meetings which give you the invaluable opportunity to get more information about that ski trip that will never actually happen. Your choice: smoking or hall meetings. Both will kill you slowly, and devoid of dignity.

A meal plan is included in the housing contract. But the food. God, the food. In short: it is bad. It's the kind of food that is so inedible that it makes you say "Gee, Red Lobster gives me bloody diarrhea, but hell, it's better than this." This is food that exhausts its welcome primarily through recycling. My roommate posits that the worst day to eat in the dining hall is Chinese garlic chicken day, which is so caked in sauce and powerful spices that it fools you into thinking it isn't yesterday's chicken skewers or the chicken breasts from the beginning of the week.

Even the salad and cereal taste bad, amazing, considering the dining halls don't cook or alter these items in any way. There are always plenty of vegetarian and vegan options, such as polenta, which may or may not be made of pine cones. Dad's Bathtub Chili is a frequent dish in the which the name says it all. If you want something salty, fatty or sugary, the dorms have you covered with a daily assortment of deep-fried something or other.

There is the option of dining at the deli-style Grab-N-Go, where each food item is assigned a point value, with five points equating a meal. However, the point value of each item has increased since last year, so a five-point meal now consists of a ham sandwich and an apple juice. A weekly meal plan consists of just 16 meals at the same cost of last year's 19 meal plan. However, this information was obtained from a pre-Grab-N-Go year, meaning extra meal points couldn't be redeemed at the end of the week. Housing essentially screwed its residents and told us it was our fault. Or, to use a deliciously appropriate metaphor, they fed us shit and told us it was cake.

Earlier this year Carson had a rodent problem. Matt Cain, the Resident Director, suggested that to combat the problem, students should not keep food in their rooms. That's a great idea - what was I thinking keeping food in the same place I live? How dare I expect my place of residence I pay $600 a month for be vermin free? But there are mice and they live in your walls. The janitorial staff has put mouse traps wherever there's a problem, which is everywhere in the building, so if you don't trip and fall on the mice, you'll trip and fall and die on the mousetraps. These are humane mousetraps, though, which means that instead of being instantaneously decapitated, the mouse goes through a little door and gets stuck on a patch of powerful glue, lured inside by a chunk of food. To recap: the mice are not injured; they get to eat tasty food and are then are let free to go live someplace else. The mice have it pretty damn good.

My sorry undergraduate compatriots and I must deal with forced community, terrible food and mice, all at above-market cost. On top of all this, the University is fond of selling the dorms out from underneath us. Though the residence halls are to be a refuge in which to sleep and study, Housing thinks nothing of whoring out the lounges to the highest bidding group, such as the high school speech competition which consumed the Carson lounges and an entire weekend in February. Their obnoxious, pubescent shrieks were a constant annoyance and reminder that Housing is a bunch of whores. Worst of all, nobody told us in advance that this would occur, ruining our sleep, studying and chaste drinking binges.

Two, three, four times a week a campus tour parades by my window, invariably led by someone I recognize from RA class or a similar sycophantic resume padder. They are just outside of Carson and I hear their spiel about the dining hall, the fact that this building is desirable and special because the rooms have sinks. The throngs of slack-jawed pre-frosh are in a highly receptive daze, halfway thinking about how great the dorms will be and halfway thinking about dirty things they want to do with Britney Spears. I see the poor innocents and I want to shout. I want to yell, "Get out while you have a chance! An apartment! A private university! Anything but this! You're so young and so full of promise!" But alas, the words do not come so easily. A rat is nibbling my big toe, rancid dining hall milk churns in my belly and asbestos coat my lungs with a cancerous candy shell. I have no soul.

As I finished writing this article, I stretched my fat little arms and sighed, happy at how my words would shed some light on the true nature of housing at the University. I put on some pants for a change and left the room. I pressed the elevator button, up, if you must know, and as I'm waiting, I notice that the new fire safety sign, the one that my hall was charged $50 to replace, has three out of four screws holding it to the wall are missing, meaning that somebody tried to steal it again and I will soon be charged for my portion of the damage/replacement cost. I wish I was homeless.

Brian Boone is a junior Canadian Studies and Phrenology major. He is a staff writer for the Oregon Commentator and one hell of a Marine.