As August wound down and the long, hot summer came to an end, so too did the quiet on the New England College campus. The Resident Advisors, the Peer Leaders, and the Fall Athletes all began to trickle onto the grounds for fall training and pre-season workouts. Along with their tales of warm weather escapades and worries about the workload that faced them as classes quickly approached, they brought concerns over a certain email which was sent out to many of them by Doreen Long, Head of Residential Life and Housing, in the weeks prior. The email read as such:
“Hello Returning NEC Student,
At this time, we are experiencing overcrowding in our residence halls. In the past, you expressed interest in living off campus so I am reaching out to you to see if you are still interested in moving off campus. If the answer is yes, you do want to live off campus, please email me back right away as we are trying to make the final placements and are trying to alleviate some of the tight spaces. Thank you.
Doreen”
Although this is not the first year that this email has been sent out to returning students, it sparked conversation and in turn generated a handful of rumors regarding the severity of the overcrowding situation. Leading up to freshmen move-in day there were whispers across campus alleging that up to one-hundred of the expected students did not yet have room assignments and by move-in day, that number rested at roughly thirty bedless freshmen. Upon asking Doreen Long for a comment on these allegations she informed me that they were false and “Move in went very smoothly this year so we plan to have a similar smooth move in next year.”
Still, aspects of this move-in have been unorthodox, with freshmen being assigned to rooms with sophomores and one freshman even boarding in a Rowe Apartment (Rowe apartments are typically saved for upperclassmen and graduate students). However, according to Long, the number of freshmen residing on campus in the fall semester of 2019 is three-hundred and ninety-one, which is “similar to previous years.”
Further, according to Jason Buck, Dean of Students, there are currently no freshmen without room assignments and some rooms even have empty spaces which is ideal, just in case people need to get shuffled around.
But not every student was happy with the housing process.
One of the students who was relocated, sophomore Connor Dunn, expressed his frustrations:
“I was looking in the spring time last year to get off campus, and I talked to multiple people. I have a dietary restriction and noted that, then I said . . . because I was already 22 years old . . . I’ve been an adult and I’ve had my own place before. They told me ‘no,’ and then they kept telling me ‘no,’ and then three weeks before coming to school they said ‘oh, we’ve decided that since you’re so close to being 23, now we want you to move off,’ which to me screams that they over-filled beds and then needed people to move off. They do it when it’s convenient to them.”
When asked if NEC at least helped him in finding an apartment in or near Henniker and he stated they did “nothing at all” to help him in that regard, however they were at least able to put his on-campus scholarship towards his tuition after he asked them specifically to do so.
Suffice to say from Dunn’s perspective, move-in day went less than smoothly. To insure a better situation for years to come, he recommends that those in charge of housing “recognize that they have the same issue every year, almost. They don’t have deposits early so they don’t want people to move off, but then they get too many deposits and the dorms are over-booked and they need to ask people to move off anyway, so they should just have some expectation for people to move off, or at least people who need to move off.”
Dunn concluded, “Let people who have legitimate reasons to live off campus do so.”
