Tower Editorial

Off-campus housing is clearly an attractive option for college students of all types. You have your party boys, and your party girls. I mean, who else really needs to live off-campus away from the prying eye of the school? You can have parties every weekend with no diciplinary consequences.

Also, it is possible that some students are ready to just be treated like adults with their own lives, devoid of the overbearing authority of RAs, with their cookie-baking crafting parties and dirty looks on Thirsty Thursday, and the RMs, keeping them safe from sex, drugs, and rock and roll.

Living in a dorm can offer a bit of a problem if you fall into either the partier or wannabe-adult categories. You are faced with visiting curfews, quiet hours, strict conduct codes, and the ever-present residence life staff, none of which are conducive to a healthy life of weekend raging or dreams of independence.

For many students, living off-campus is an easy answer to their dorm ridden woes.

However, some students who chose this option of “freedom,” were apparently not up for the challenge.
Those who wished to rid themselves of the dorm life have consequently made their off-campus homes an extension of Flather Hall.

Dorm mentality runs deep in the apartment buildings at Monroe Street Market. Elevators, hallways, and stairwells are trashed with beer cans and cigarette butts on the regular. It is unlikely to think the cause of these abuses are the local Brookland families or the starving artists who live above the Arts Walk and can’t afford beer anyways.

So, who must it be? The young, driven, and hardworking students of Catholic University who were faced with the opportunity of adulthood and took advantage of it.

While it is up to Monroe Street Market to handle disorderly residents, CUA students or not, it is not up to them to instate themselves as off-campus RAs by tattling on misbehaved Catholic U tennants to their school.

Why not give them exactly what they want instead? Treat them as the independent, decision-making, party-throwing adults they wish to be, and give them the same treatment any other evictable resident would be given.

Hold them accountable for their shennanigans and dorm-style habits, but do not attempt to impose on-campus rules to off-campus residents.