Residents of Griesedieck and Marguerite halls are in store for some major changes next year-should they choose to remain.
Following upon the decision last December to postpone the proposed Freshmen Center until the 2003-2004 academic year, the Department of Residence Life has opted to begin next year with the policies intended for the Freshmen Center.
Those policies were determined for Griesedieck and Marguerite only and were detailed in a letter to all residence hall students sent on Dec. 17, 2001.
They include no alcohol or alcohol container collections allowed in either building, all floors in those buildings will be made single gender, and students and their guests will be allowed to visit an opposite gender floor from Sunday though Thursday from 7 a.m. to 1 a.m. and on Friday and Saturday from 7 a.m. to 2 a.m. Students may still visit a same gender floor any time of the day.
Argyle Wade, director of Housing, said, “The policies are one part of a larger, multidimensional program for first-year students that we had initial discussion on with Student Government Association.”
The Freshmen Center idea will likely include a freshmen course, all-freshmen housing and additional support services.
“We didn’t want to just do policies and nothing else, but conversations with the Student Government Association led to holding off everything else,” Wade said.
Nick Sarcone, chair of the SGA Residential Affairs Committee, said that he believes the policies to be unfair. “They were intended to be enacted with a freshmen center for all freshmen and only freshmen. Now they affect sophomores and not even the whole freshmen class.”
The new alcohol policy will have little effect on the buildings, as only one percent of students living in them are 21 years old.
“If very few people have the ability to legally drink in these buildings anyway, this policy change only serves to further clarify that they are alcohol-free environments,” Wade said.
As for single-gender floors, one of the current plans includes making Walsh Hall and Clemens Hall female buildings while the Griesedieck Tower will be all male. Marguerite would likely be split with one sex on the top half and the other on the lower half.
The visitation policies were determined by Residence Life, which conducted a survey of 22 Jesuit institutions. From the survey results, Residence Life found 11 universities had visitation policies and 11 did not.
Loyola University of Chicago has a weekday policy of visitation from 10 a.m. to midnight. Creighton University has a similar policy of 10 a.m. to 1 a.m. on weekdays and 10 a.m. to 2 a.m. on weekends. Marquette University requires opposite sex guests be out by 1 a.m. on weekdays and 2 a.m. on weekends.
On the other hand, Georgetown University and Boston College are just a few of the Jesuit schools with 24-hour visitation.
According to the survey by Residence Life, all but Georgetown have policies against overnight guests of the opposite sex. From this data, Residence Life drafted proposed visitation hours and requested the suggestions of SGA on the matter.
According to Sarcone, while his committee originally did not recommend the visitation policies, they did suggest more lenient hours than proposed and adopted by Residence Life.
“Enforcement of these new policies will be handled by the student and professional staff,” said Wade.
However, Sarcone and his committee questioned the ability of Residence Life staff to truly enforce these policies.
“I don’t think they really know how they’re going to enforce them,” said Sarcone. “We couldn’t even come up with a way to enforce them.”
Wade said that the punishments for policy violations would remain the same as any policy violation, with the student being educated about the policy and, if necessary, having consequences applied.
Currently, 411 sophomores live in Griesedieck and Marguerite out of a total of 1,158 students. Wade said these numbers are pretty typical every year. Assuming the same number of this year’s freshmen would opt to remain in Griesedieck and Marguerite, then some freshmen will have to live elsewhere on campus, and thus be exempt from the policies of Griesedieck and Marguerite.
“I’m all for the policies if they help freshmen adjust, but instead you’re going to give it next to people who know a different system and are more inclined to break the rules,” said Sarcone.
