By Bethany Doudna
Staff Writer
I acknowledge that a good Catholic campus, such as ours aspires to be, must obviously have a code of conduct relating to dorm visitation. However, there are quite a few particulars of Franciscan University’s visitation policies that I find unreasonable.
St. Junipero Serra Hall, for example, holds Open House Hours (when visitors of the opposite gender are permitted in rooms) for four hours on Sunday evening from 7 p.m. to 11 p.m. St. Agnes Hall has similar rules, holding Open House Hours from 7 p.m. to 11 p.m. on Saturday and from 1 p.m. to 5 p.m. on Sunday.
These are such oddly arbitrary times to set as the boundary. My first thought was that the Open House hours correspond to the Resident Assistants’ office hours, but this is not the case, as the R.A. offices open at 9 p.m. Wherein lies the impropriety of having guests over at 10 a.m.?
I also take issue with the last sentence of Section A of Policy 8 in the Assisi Heights 2022-2023 manual: “[Guests] standing in the hallway/stairwell is prohibited.”
This is not under the section dealing with guests of the opposite gender, mind you. I might understand this rule better if it were, since the hallways and stairs are adjacent to the (gasp) bedrooms. No, this rule applies to guests of both genders. This is obviously an absurdly finicky thing to forbid.
Further down, Policy 11 of the manual says, “Overnight guests [defined as any non-resident of Assisi Heights] must be approved by the Residence Director.”
Those of us living in Assisi Heights are generally over 20 years of age at least. I do not believe it is reasonable for us to go through the process of petitioning the Residence Offices every time a friend stays late and then wishes to sleep on the couch. If the guest in question is not from campus at all, then sure, Residence Life has the right to take interest.
In my humble opinion, a better version of this rule would be that a fellow student must get permission to stay more than one night in a Height.
To paraphrase Alaska governor Mike Dunleavy, to implement rules and laws that the majority of the population will obviously ignore leads to widespread contempt for the governing body.
I believe it would be wise for our residence directors to overhaul the policy manual in a more reasonable manner.