Rush Reagan's Real Deal

Another wonderful year has started here at IU, with the sun shining, birds chirping, and students living in lounges. All is well and normal here in Bloomington. Wait a minute, students living in lounges? Can it be true? Yes, it is a fact that students are living in lounges on this campus.

All over this campus, students are being forced to live in lounges because IU failed to have enough available housing. Students are provided with beds, a chest of drawers, desks, cable hook-ups, and many of the other things that students in normal rooms receive. However, there is one thing that students in lounges are not provided with. There are no telephones in the lounges, and there are no plans to put them in.

Students who live in lounges have been told that it is not going to be "cost-effective" to put phones in the lounges, because students will not be in the lounges for very long (just out of curiousity, how many students have been moved out of lounges so far?). So if a student needs to make a phone call, they are to go to the front desk and use the phone there. That may be more cost-effective, but it is both inconsiderate as well as insulting to make the lounge-livers do that.

So I have some ideas to remedy the situation. First off, the easiest would be to just put phones in to give the loungers a break. And I know exactly who should do it. The IU Student Association should dig into their coffers and put in phones. Oh wait a minute, I wonder how much money the IUSA has left since they have started funding to the neo-Marxist paper griot. I'm glad to see the IUSA is spending OUR money on something such as griot, a paper that every student is sure to read, instead of getting phones for only a few students.

Here is another idea to remedy the problem: Have administrators spend some time in a lounge for a while and see how they like it, while the loungers stay in the administrators' homes. I'm sure that housing would quickly be found for the loungers.

Finally, if you know someone living in a lounge, try to be considerate when talking to them. I know someone who lives in a lounge, and everytime he introduces himself and tells people he lives in a lounge, the response is "Oh, you're one of those people."

So I want to wish the students living in the lounges good luck in getting real rooms. I hope that real rooms become available soon. As for the IUSA and administration, you should be ashamed of yourself for what you are doing. And that's the real deal.