The Division of University Housing provides a residential community for 7,000 undergraduate students. The residence halls are students' homes-we are not in the business of running a hotel.
We provide a safe and comfortable living environment for students who are here to succeed academically. We do everything we can to support the successes of students who have paid to live in a residence hall community. Many of these students are first year students and we are interested in helping them make the transition to college.
I do recognize that we will likely turn away some drunk people who will show up at the residence hall looking for a free place to stay. We are not a hotel. We provide space for 7,000 students who have paid to live here. Do you really expect us to welcome drunk out-of-town people at 3 am who have not paid to live here?
Our experience has shown us the majority of issues that arise due to Halloween are caused by out-of-town guests. Our halls are equipped to accommodate 7,000 students. Adding an additional two or three thousand guests puts a tax on the quality of services we can provide our residents. The bottom line for us is, one, we cannot accommodate 3,000 additional people in the halls, two, the majority of problems are caused by non-residents, and three, it clearly is not in the best interest of all residence hall students to have folks living with us that are not part of the community and/or don't care about the community.
We expect our residents not to have guests over the Halloween weekend out of respect for the other residents who they share community space with. Our students understand the concept of sharing and the difficulties that go along with living in a community. Please be assured that we have every intention of enforcing the guest policy in University Housing that weekend. Students will be notified in the near future about the consequences if they chose to violate the policy.
We look forward to providing a safe environment for all our residence hall students Halloween weekend and every weekend to ensure their safety and success.
