Housing and Dining sent a series of e-mails this past summer to offer incentives for returning students to give up their on-campus housing as a way to better deal with the massive influx of admitted students. First, it offered gift cards sufficient to furnish an off-campus apartment and assistance in finding alternate housing. It followed these offers with another with more head-turning offer: a chance to trade the humdrum of dorm life for luxurious hotel accommodations, weekly maid service, even pool access -- all at a price consistent with on-campus double-occupancy room rates. An "on call shuttle service" would even be provided.
As it turns out, relatively few students chose to leave their on-campus housing to live the hotel life. As a result, most students who live in the hotel accommodations are students who are in the Abroad at AU program. These students often expressed a desire to live on campus but were told they could not due to space restrictions.
Interviews with those who now live at the Holiday Inn Georgetown have unearthed an unsettling sense that AU has forgotten its promise: shuttles are not truly on call, and transportation is restrictive. Instead, they run every 30 minutes, from 6 to 10 a.m. and from 5 to 8:30 p.m. Shuttles are only on call during the daytime, and no nighttime service is available past 8:30 p.m.
This is extremely inconvenient for the dozens of students who now live there. Some who live there (who in many cases came to AU extremely unfamiliar with D.C.) have 8:10 p.m. block classes. When these classes adjourn at 10:40 p.m., these students must walk home 35 to 40 minutes, take a Metrobus or call a cab. Even though walking home at 10:40 p.m. in a city is dangerous (as evidenced by recent armed robberies), Housing and Dining currently offers no way for the students to get back to the Holiday Inn, instead leaving the students, many of whom didn't want to live off campus in the first place, to fend for themselves. This is unacceptable.
Students who go to AU to study abroad are less experienced in the use of the Metrobus system, and cabs are inordinately expensive. AU should have done something to assist these students from the beginning. Even if only 10 or 15 students require nighttime transportation, why can't AU ask the hotel to send one shuttle at 11 p.m.? How much could that cost? It surely couldn't be more than AU students' safety.
