How to accommodate the University’s incompetence

by Jack Holloway | October 10th, 2007

Freshers’ week in a Holiday Inn is a bad joke.

The accommodation crisis that has faced successive years of freshers is beginning to seem like a bad joke. Last year a lack of adequate kitchen facilities forced the University to shell out compensation to the poor mites who couldn’t so much as boil water for a Pot Noodle, let alone cook a decent meal. At least they had their own rooms.

This time round, Langwith students are living in a Holiday Inn and the block that Vanbrugh students were supposed to occupy, the appropriately-named Barron Court, is far from complete, with some students not due to move in until Spring 2008.

The implications of this are two-fold. Firstly, it gives freshers the impression that the University is badly run and can’t complete projects when they are due. Or rather, they will not be deluded into any false hopes of competence from the outset.

Secondly, and crucially, it is an emotional upheaval, especially for those students who will settle into Derwent or Goodricke, only to be uprooted within months and shoved into another new set of circumstances with a new set of people. This is a financial issue for the University, but a welfare issue for the students affected.

In some ways, the University is not at fault. Vice-Chancellor Brian Cantor may be an all-powerful presence on campus, but he can’t (at least as far as we know) control the weather at will. If water damage caused the building delays then they could not have been anticipated, but the project has been put off for so long anyway that this recent barrier to completion seemed to be just one in a long line of problems.

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