Following a meeting with representatives from the Arts Haus and the Crafts House earlier this month, the Office of Residential Life and Learning (ResLife) has decided to defer a policy that would have prevented students from living in one of the universitys 15 Special Interest Houses for more than one year.
Discussion about possible revisions to the policy will instead continue into next year, with six students allowed to return to the Arts Haus and four to the Crafts House for the 2013-2014 academic school year, according to junior Arts Haus treasurer Ian McConnell and sophomore Crafts House resident Michael Schneider, respectively.
We discussed returning students to the houses for the purpose of ongoing continuity and programming ... and agreed to their return for another year, Director of ResLife Yolanda King told the Daily in an email.
ResLife last month notified the specialty houses that the office would be enforcing the one-year living policy, which was in the housing manual but had never been strictly implemented in the past, McConnell said.
Members of the Arts Haus and the Crafts House then voiced their concerns about the policy to ResLife and the administration, arguing that the regulation would be detrimental to the specialty housing community.
If you really want to try and have these alternative spaces for people to go into and feel safe and comforted by, then youre going have to have some kind of retention, McConnell said.
At a meeting with King and Dean of Undergraduate and Graduate Students John Barker, McConnell and Schneider proposed an alternative policy that would deal with housing requests on a case-by-case basis.
All of this is very tentative, but it sounds like theyre not going to be going forward with the one-year policy, McConnell said. Were going to see a revision, I think.
The students also addressed the lack of communication between ResLife and the Special Interest Houses, which has led to confusion about several other policies, he explained.
Moving forward, we expect to see a few more resources on the [ResLife] website, Schneider told the Daily in an email. Additionally, we will be building more communication materials to facilitate conversations with ResLife as to how we in the house operate internally.
King said that all Special Interest Houses will be required to submit updated mission statements at the end of every year to clarify their goals and what each house represents on campus.
Although the housing manual currently states that each house must have a constitution, McConnell said, many houses were unaware of this policy.
Wed maybe heard about it, but it wasnt really anything definitive, he said, noting that the Arts Haus has recently been working on a constitution.
ResLife will now use the mission statements more explicitly when evaluating the needs of the different houses, Schneider explained.
We [in the Crafts House] are in the process of updating our mission and by-laws to be more inclusive of the different conceptual arms of Crafts House, he said.
The specialty houses are working on forming a collective with representatives from each house in order to improve communications with ResLife, McConnell said.
Were going to get all the specialty houses on campus aligned to kind of get a dialogue [going] about what were experiencing, what our problems are, what our roses and thorns are, and hopefully have that act as a mediator between the specialty houses and ResLife, he said.
McConnell hopes that the collective will receive official university recognition next semester, when discourse about the one-year policy will resume.
Were not looking for autonomy, but were looking for better communication and more dialogue to have things done more effectively on campus, he said.
