Although I am neither a fan of the University’s frequently sub-par policies, nor of the City of Rochester itself, I found Karissa Page’s attack on the University’s campaign encouraging students to live off campus to be grossly inaccurate and unfair.
Her objections seem to reflect much more her own poor decision making and priorities than any sort of active fault by the University or the City of Rochester. The decision to live off campus consists in a weighing of advantages (better food, more freedom, etc.) and disadvantages (distance to campus, parking, etc). Most, if not all, of Page’s points in her “counter-propaganda” campaign reflect her own failures in this decision process. If parking for her is such a terrible ordeal, she should have weighed this more heavily in her calculations or should have tried to find alternatives, such as a neighborhood connected to campus through city buses. Likewise, her (borderline offensive) objections to dealing with RPD and her neighbors boil down to nothing more than her personal bad decisions in choosing where she wanted to live. If she has a car anyway, why did she not choose a neighborhood that’s “better” and still accessible by car, like the Park Ave.-Monroe-East Ave. neighborhoods cited in Luke Rosiak’s article?
Page’s article was constructed on personal ignorance and a foolhardy utopian vision of off-campus living as all the advantages of dorm life, minus security and bad food. A wiser student would have been aware of the fact that off-campus living is by definition not dorm life. It requires better decision making and greater independence and maturity than any on-campus situation requires. Most of the author’s supposedly terrible disadvantages in reality could have been (and some still can be) surmounted with even a modicum of careful thought and planning that should be expected from any college junior or senior.
Until Ms. Page can construct an article that relies on actual objections instead of hollow reflections of her own faulty choices, she should not try to undermine one of the University’s initiatives that is (for once) admirable.
-Alexander Foard Class of 2007
