Editorial: Its too late to move students to hotels

It’s ironic, isn’t it? With finals approaching, Residence Life is finally giving all students crammed in study lounges the opportunity to get out.
The Kaimin reported today that after students have been stuck in interim housing — an overused euphemism for study lounges, TV rooms and anywhere else Residence Life could stuff students — for 13 weeks, the 24 remaining transients have been offered rooms in hotels near campus.
While it’s the right move by Residence Life Director Ron Brunell, it’s coming about three months too late. At this point, the gesture reeks of trying to save face. Because now — after they’ve settled into their dungeons, accepted their fates and slowly waited their turns to get moved into big kid rooms — is the worst possible time to move students.
Brunell says in today’s front-page story that the move is aimed at giving the students “accommodations to do well academically” for finals. 

So, let’s get this straight. We’re giving students rooms where they have to walk forever to get to the library but porn is just the click of a remote control away? And we want them to spend the time that they should be using to gear up for the last weeks of classes and final exams —because all of us at the University of Montana are so darned studious — by packing up all their crap and moving for three lousy weeks, only to pack up again? And pay more money for their housing than they pay now?
This is a sucky plan and the students know it. That’s why only four of them accepted the offer to move into hotels. Not that they knew which hotel they would be moved into; they were asked to accept a relocation to a hotel “within walking distance of campus.” That could be the swanky Double Tree or the Thunderbird and its coin-operated vibrating beds.
Brunell deserves kudos for trimming the number of students stuck in study lounges down from 148, which seemed an impossible task earlier this semester. But one has to wonder about Residence Life’s true motives, because until now, it showed no interest in moving the students off campus.
Could it be that Brunell was waiting to get the number chiseled down to a point where it would be cheap for the University? Could it be that Brunell wanted to clear up the study lounges for students who wanted to actually, you know, study?
Even if either of those reasons were the case, they don’t do anything to help the students who live in the study lounges. After all they’ve been through, they’re the ones who deserve it.
Next semester the 22 students will be moved to permanent dorms and this semester-long saga will fade into history —until next fall. Then is the time to move students into hotels.
— Bill Oram, editor, william.oram@umontana.edu