University Residence Halls and Apartments gave undergraduate residents of Creekside Village apartments the shaft earlier this year when they told the students to pack up and move out upon the completion of their current lease. While the university's decision is understandable, the disrespectful treatment of the undergraduates is a result of the university's own poor planning.
Joseph Krakowiak, director of University Residence Halls and Apartments, said the students forced to move would be given top priority in getting another on-campus apartment. Frankly, this is the least they could do to maintain any sense of fairness, especially considering that they specifically invited the undergraduates to live in the complex after too few graduate students applied to live in the newly opened complex last year. These undergraduate students were all under the impression that they would be given the chance at living in the same place for two years like all other on-campus apartment residents. Instead, they discovered over winter break that they would have to uproot and move at the end of the year.
If the URH&A administrators wanted to be truly fair, they would grandfather the juniors currently living in Creekside into letting them stay for one more year but not accept any further undergraduates into the complex. UB could then bill the apartments as an exclusively graduate and married-student complex, as originally planned. Undergraduates and graduates pay the same rent for the same apartments; there is no difference between the money paid by an undergraduate student and that paid by a graduate student. There is no clear and obvious incentive for kicking out the undergraduates, and in only a year the problem would resolve itself when all the students, now juniors, graduated and moved on.
In light of all this, a more friendly treatment of the undergraduates is not entirely out of line. At any large bureaucracy, the most common criticism is a lack of humanity from the top in dealing with those at the bottom. UB had a chance to show empathy for 44 students living in Creekside Village by acknowledging that packing up one's life year after year is inconvenient and unpleasant - that is, by allowing the students to remain.
The university would not sacrifice any money, nor would it sacrifice much space (only one-fifth of the entire complex is currently occupied by juniors) to make the lives of a few dozen or so students easier. The administration should reconsider allowing these students to stay in their apartments - their homes - for one more year, because it is not only the nice thing to do, but the right thing to do.
Photo: Courtesy of Laron Fomby
