By Brittney Payette
Managing Editor
Cameron has many great features, including its free community Psychology Clinic, free tutoring services, and great professors.
However, the Cameron dorms are a different story.
Over the years, numerous residents have made a multitude of complaints about the dorms. I have lived in the dorms for three years, and my experience has progressively worsened each year.
My primary issue with the dorms is the abysmal plumbing situation. The toilets frequently overflow, causing urine, blood, and poop to get on the bathroom floor. The sinks stop up every semester as well.
The bathroom also seems to have mold growing in places, particularly around the back of the toilets. A soap dispenser on the eighth floor in South Shepler has been broken for over a year. One of the previous cleaning ladies said she ordered our soap dispenser at the beginning of last semester, but the residents never received it.
The laundry rooms seem to be rarely cleaned, which is utterly ridiculous because housing recently replaced all of the washers and dryers. One might think that would mean that housing would want to keep the washers and dryers clean because they are new, but evidently, that is not the case.
Additionally, housing has decided to no longer provide paper towels in the bathrooms in the dorms. They say it is because they found paper towels in the toilets. However, the plumbing has been messed up for years.
Moreover, I should not have woken up one morning to find urine, excrement, and blood on the bathroom floor because the toilets were clogged and overflowed. I should not have gone to use the shower one day and found that the showers were not draining, so there was a pool of water on the shower floor. I should have access to paper towels in the dorm bathrooms just like there are in other areas on campus.
Housing keeps threatening to charge people community fines to fix these issues despite the problems occurring for years.
Instead of calling out a professional plumber to get to the root of the plumbing issue(s), Cameron merely has a maintenance worker come out and look at the plumbing. I am sure the maintenance workers do a lot around campus, but for an issue this substantial, Cameron needs to call an actual plumber.
Cameron housing has essentially been putting a band aid on a gunshot wound by doing minor things such as flushing the toilet until it hopefully flushes properly. This has been going on too long and has gotten far too bad for housing to continue cutting corners to save money in the short term.
What is worse is that housing knows about these issues. Students talk about the horrible problems they have experienced while living in the dorms frequently, but still, we are ignored.
Housing is still choosing to ignore the residents. After all, they don’t have to live in these conditions, so why should they care?
They punish us by taking our paper towels, and they are even increasing the costs of living in the dorms despite the problems in the dorms getting worse over time. They still refuse to fix things properly and in a timely fashion.
I should not have woken up early in the morning because Cameron decided to do renovations on the 6th floor but failed to tell housing or its residents that this would be occurring. They just started renovating without any warning for the dorm residents, and they did not even tell us why they were doing all this construction.
I am lucky enough to have other places I can go and stay if things get too bad. However, not everyone is that fortunate, especially our foreign exchange students who live in the dorms.
Sophomore Sports and Exercise Science major Emma Costantini is a foreign exchange student from France who is living in the dorms and says that she finds the price for the dorms to be too expensive for the quality of service there is for the dorms.
“The toilets are always broken,” Constantini said. “We did not have heat in the beginning of the semester when it was freezing outside and the showers and toilets are dirty. Also, food at the cafeteria is not the best, and I’m paying and not eating there.”
To the readers, I ask this of you; please use your voices to help us get the dorms fixed. People should not have to live like this. Cameron is an excellent school with outstanding professors, but the housing situation has to improve. No one wants to live in these conditions.
