Housing at the University of Montevallo is often at the top of the list of student complaints. When it comes to visitation hours, the current policy is 10 a.m. to midnight on weekdays and until 2 a.m. on Friday and Saturday. Many other universities have much less archaic policies.
For comparison, many other universities in the state have better rules in place for visitation and cohabitation, with many colleges like the University of Alabama and the University of North Alabama having 24-hour visitation with a cumulative 72-hour period allowed for cohabitation or overnight stays.
The University of Alabama at Birmingham, or UAB, has 24-hour policies with a sign in sheet, with five overnight guests allowed per calendar month. Auburn has a more comparable policy to ours, however the hours are 10 a.m. to 2 a.m. every single day.
There are also “verbal policies” in place at Montevallo, with people following them but not written down in the Residence Hall handbook. One of these policies allows a guest of the same sex as the residents being allowed to stay in the hall one night a week with RHD approval.
Montevallo visitation hours also apply to any cohabitated space in a residence hall, such as the honors lounge in Ramsay or any Greek chapter room.
Personally, I’m tired of how housing is affecting our students. With the notion that college is where people learn how to be adults, you would expect the students to be treated as such. With certain policies in place, it seems like housing only wants to treat students as children.
With guests across the board having to be agreed upon by roommates, it makes no sense that the roommates can’t agree to have someone stay the night, even for an insignificant period, such as UA and UNA’s policies on 72-hour periods.
Even if there were issues in a residence hall, the housing staff is on duty from 6 p.m. to 8 a.m. These policies also undermine these staff members’ abilities to do their jobs.
There are also so many issues when it comes to accessibility in residence halls. Some residence halls, such as Napier and Hanson, lack an elevator for accessibility to higher floors. Napier is marketed to students as an accessible space with the only entrance being the backdoor that only lets into the basement, where there are no rooms for residents.
Another outstanding issue is getting things fixed in residence halls. It often takes multiple days if not weeks to get things fixed. Sometimes even major issues such as black mold growing in Napier, pipes bursting in Main and flooding floors in Ramsay are often overlooked and just temporarily fixed, if at all.
There are even sections in the Residence Hall Handbook titled, “What do I do if I have mold in my room?” Very often, all the physical plant does is paint over it and move on, without solving the baseline issue.
A recent example of fixes on campus is that a Greek organization on campus had a fire alarm blaring in their chapter room for months on end, and the physical plant never sent anyone to fix it. Eventually one of their own members tore it down, only to get reprimanded by the very office who ignored fixing it to begin with.
This is all to say that the Housing Office is failing to do their main duties, forcing students to follow outdated rules while forcing them to pay multiple thousands of dollars to live in a space that often is unsafe for them to live in.
RHDs and RAs try their best to help their residents as they must also in the same awful conditions that other students have to put up with. At the end of the day, all these complaints and issues are caused and ignored by an administration that seemingly does not care as much as they say they do.
