How will you spend your Thanksgiving break?
Last Friday, a freshman in Weinstein residence hall had to deal with the collapse of part of her bathroom ceiling. Facilities and Construction Management moved to repair the broken ceiling the following Tuesday and completely fixed the bathroom two days later. In total, F&CM took six days to put back together the Weinstein bathroom, during which time the student was unable to use her bathroom.
NYU housing says repairs are supposed to be fixed efficiently after a student submits a simple maintenance request form, so it is unacceptable that a problem as crucial as the collapse of a bathroom ceiling took six days to fix. We recognize that the incident occurred on a weekend, but a partial ceiling collapse is a matter of student safety and should be addressed immediately.
The university tries to persuade students to remain in campus housing for all four years, but episodes like this only encourage students to move off-campus . Granted, this appears to be a single, isolated incident, but problems with repair and maintenance in housing have arisen before. And while it is unreasonable for anyone to expect 24-hour on-call maintenance service, six days for a collapsed ceiling is absurd.
As part of the university's effort to improve communication between the higher facets of NYU and the student body as well as better gauge overall student satisfaction, task forces composed of students and faculty have been instated. The goal of these is to gauge student contentment with university happenings and make strides toward improving interactions between students and the administration.
The task force focused specifically on housing should make sure not to overlook individual circumstances when determining the quality of student life within campus housing. F&CM is a big aspect of living in the dorms, and if residents find it to be unsatisfactory, NYU's task force can work to improve it. With that being said, most members of the WSN Editorial Board have had positive experiences with submitting maintenance requests within campus housing. But it is the isolated happenings like the collapsed ceiling that bring about negative feelings about housing repair.
If NYU wants to keep its students in housing, incidents like this one should be dealt with immediately, and the task forces should work to fix these smaller problems before they grow into something harder to manage.
