Suite, suite protest

IU Board of Trustees voted two weeks ago to increase IU housing costs by 3.48 percent, but for the life of me, I can’t see what that money is financing.

Considering IU demands all students spend their freshman year on campus unless they qualify for an exemption, that’s a pretty sizable captive market, before even considering the handful of upperclassmen who will opt to return to the dorms.

If IU approached low-cost housing with the same enthusiasm it reserves for building suites, I’d be willing to accept such a hike as simply another unpleasant reminder of the hard economic times. However, I think we, as students, have every reason to be upset about this.

We’ve had a shortage of campus housing for the past several years. IU’s response has been to build suites. Suites in the Union Street Center, suites at Third and Union, and, lest we forget, gutting the cheap Briscoe Quad housing and replacing it with, you guessed it, suites.

It’s not that I don’t understand the reasoning. The suites are nice, convenient, modern housing right on campus — the sort of palatial quarters that look good on brochures and guided tours.

They’re also very expensive.

I’m not demanding we all live in squalor where we have to wrestle cockroaches the size of terriers in order to take a shower.

However, I have a hard time believing there were more students unwilling to deign themselves to live among the common dorm riff-raff than students who just want a cheap place to sleep in the evening.

If only there were some way I could articulate the depth of my displeasure to the trustees, because I feel wholly unwelcome among the IU Strike participants.

I suspect this is my fault, as the IU protests seem to be founded on principles, something I utterly lack. It’s all well and good to demand an egalitarian system, but everyone, from the protesters to the administration, understands that the strike’s goals are too radical to actually change anything.

I don’t want to demonstrate my meaningless rejection of a fundamentally unfair system. I want to make things suck less.

Pragmatism may be a cold comfort when compared to the strike’s utopist fantasy of cheap education and fair wages, but I’d rather eat bread and water than starve while imagining a steak dinner.

It doesn’t fix everything, or even most things, but agreeing to reconsider the 3.48 percent housing cost hike would be a step in the right direction.

It would do a little to reduce the potential student debt of incoming students.

Knowing the administration is willing to work with us would engender the goodwill of the student body.

It would mean a little less money for IU, but if we can tighten our belts and endure tuition hikes, maybe Residential Programs and Services can do the same next year.

If nothing else, all that suite revenue might be expected to help tide them over.

­— stefsoko@indiana.edu