As the members of the Saint Louis University community, we must stick up for our housing interests. We must explicitly state what we expect. We must identify how we want to live at SLU and then make it happen.
That being said, we’ve complied a short list of improvements we’d like to see on campus. These improvements are just a few that would make SLU a place students would really like to live. Here are our preliminary suggestions for Saint Louis University housing and campus life.
1. Improve housing conditions: The Village Apartments are swell, and proposed renovations for Walsh and Clemens Halls are highly anticipated and long overdue. But for students to get the full value of their $2,000 housing scholarship, improvements should be made to existing housing. What about dishwashers in the apartments or cable jacks in bedrooms? What about thorough summer cleaning, new carpet and clean ventilation? The residences students pay thousands of dollars to live in should be, if nothing else, clean and comfortable.
2. Increase BSC ambience: KSLU radio station could be piped through the Busch Student Center in the evening, and D.J.’s could take requests while students study. More students could take advantage of the “Sing for your Supper” program in the BSC during the day.
3. Extend late-night hours: Venues like the BSC, the library and the DeMattias Hall convenience store should stay open 24 hours a day, at least during the week, providing communal places for students to hang out after 9:00 p.m. SLU could buy the old Quotations building and found an all-night diner. They could put the huge, empty and unused BSC Suite 319 to use as a recreational center and gathering place, complete with ping-pong and comfy couches.

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To tackle the twin predicaments of admitting more students to SLU and keeping them on campus, administrators reinstated the $2000 housing scholarship last year, as students in the classes of 2009 and 2010 know firsthand.
Students with merit-based scholarships can only keep the $2000 if they live on campus. Otherwise, they forfeit the money.
Nobody’s complaining about the increased sense of community administrators hope to foster by keeping students on the Frost campus. It would be great to see more people actually hanging out in the quad or socializing in the BSC. And who would protest an increase in GPA? Yes, keeping students on campus is a good plan for both students and administrators-students have a shorter walk to class, and administrators collect more room and board money.
What plenty of students have complained about, though, is the scholarship policy itself. It’s just silly to require students to live on campus if the university has no space for them.
Freshman housing, it seems, will pose little problem in coming years. Housing officials claim that Reinert Hall can accommodate 54 more freshmen before it reaches capacity at 552 beds. Griesidieck complex holds 877 students. If we fill these buildings to capacity with freshmen and have at least 300 freshmen commuters, we could easily accommodate 1800 students in an incoming class.
But what happens in two years when all four classes must live on campus to retain their scholarships? How will we fit approximately 6,5000 sophomores, juniors and seniors into upperclassman housing’s 2,000 bed-spaces? This semester, 1,378 freshmen and 1,073 sophomores-those with the housing scholarship-live on campus; only 492 juniors and 396 seniors live here.
The Department of Housing and Residence Life has made clear that it plans to deal with that question in February after it sees how demand for upper-class housing pans out. We have recommended, and still recommend, that it form a plan of action now, before it finds itself with hundreds of restless, homeless students. Whether in the form of master-leasing, a new dormitory or remission of the scholarship for upperclassmen, administrators should have a firm back-up plan instead of stating that nothing has yet been determined.

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So what do you want to see? Send your suggestions to [email protected]. Let’s figure out what we want, and then we’ll figure out how to make it happen.