The Facts:
The Board of Trustees regulates the University’s 24-hour visitation policy. All other ACC schools, including N.C. State’s Tobacco Road neighbors, have policies allowing non same-sex visitors after 2 a.m.
Our Opinion:
It’s time the BOT relinquishes direct control on this controversial issue and allows students and administrators on the ground to help determine updated policy.
Most students’ first college experiences are formed by their experiences in dormitories. The people, the situations and their resident advisors play a huge role in the way they form those memories and remember the University.
In essence, it’s a student experience. And the University has set up organizations like the Inter-Residence Council to ensure that students get to help shape those experiences along with the administrators in University Housing.
Both organizations incorporate active student involvement and University employees who are on the ground with students and can hopefully understand their concerns, helping to mold those in binding rules and policies.
Despite the effectiveness of this system, the University’s Board of Trustees has continued to regulate an element of resident policy: visitation. The Board still holds students in dormitories to an archaic 24-hour visitation policy where only same-sex visitors are allowed after 2 a.m.
Enforcement on visitation is already a farce, allowing IRC and University Housing to regulate policy to recognize societal changes is a logical way to keep the policies realistic.
In fact, N.C. State is now the only school in the Atlantic Coast Conference — an organization of many similar schools — that doesn’t allow 24-hour visitation.
It seems incredibly out of touch that the trustees would continue to hang on to this policy when the University’s Triangle brethren have given it up. Such a controversial issue must be taken up by students and administrators, not by a group of trustees who don’t understand the true dynamics of the situation. The University already has institutions in place that can give students the proper forum for discussion on this topic and it’s ridiculous the BOT isn’t utilizing them.
Sadly, the issue won’t be addressed until the July 15 meeting, when most students will be away — silencing many of their voices.
Sweeping it under the table again in July, or failing to acquiesce, would do students a disservice and would herald images of the sort of unresponsiveness the University community witnessed with McQueen Campbell last summer.
Doing the right thing is simple: give the control to the students and educated administrators — where it belongs — and move on to the visionary issues the BOT should address, like the methodologies for controlling class sizes.