This is going to be an interesting year for IU Southeast.
For the first time, we have students who are actually supposed to be living on campus, rather than a random person holing up in a student organization office for days at a time.
The IUS Police Department reported about 360 students who moved in on Aug. 21, nearly filling every dorm available.
Wait a second — did I just use the D word?
I did, and I will not apologize for it.
Look, I understand a number of offices around campus have been doing everything they can to separate our residence halls from many of the others available across the country. Yes, they’re very nice, but they’re not lodges. No one’s skiing here.
Besides, calling them lodges doesn’t separate them from any other dorms. It’s a pretty obvious marketing term. If you want people in the dorms, let them speak for themselves. I’m sure the tours brought in more people than a name.
As such, in this newspaper anyway, we’re still referring to the individual apartment units as dorms. They are what they are, and both Merriam-Webster and Oxford English dictionaries would call them dorms. Check out their definitions.
We will use the word lodge, but only if we’re referring to a certain residence hall. If we’re referring to them generically, residence hall will be used.
But that’s enough of the boring semantics we’ll be using. Every office and student organization on this campus has a series of interesting opportunities and daunting challenges facing them with residential students in the mix.
We have a group of people here whom we have to cater to, and we should cater to them. After all, they are paying a premium to live here, so we should do everything we can to make sure they get their money’s worth and then some.
But campus groups, whether student- or university-run, have a captive audience to take advantage of. They’ll have to be careful how they exploit that opportunity to draw people in, and they’ll also have to stay in touch with what’s actually hip, and what’s just plain corny.
Student government will have more on their hands, too. Now they have an opportunity to have an active group of students to address, represent and listen to.
I’ve also heard mutterings of finding out what businesses give student discounts in the area and putting that information together to share with students. That’s a great idea, considering the people living here will most likely need to save that money the most. It’s not like they’re not paying enough to live here.
Or their parents. Whatever.
It seems like I’m forgetting something here. I mean, there’s another group of people on campus who deserves some attention.
Oh yeah — the rest of us, the commuter students.
Commuter students have made up the entirety of the IU Southeast student body until last week. Even so, we still count for more than 90 percent of the students who pay tuition, student activity fees and provide money to the university in a wealth of other ways.
I don’t think anyone would intentionally overlook commuter students, and it’s nice to see we’ve been invited to everything going on here. I’m just saying groups on campus should be careful not to exclude the rest of us.
So anyway, I’d like to welcome the residential students. I hope your stay in your dorms (yes, I said it again) is pleasant. We’ll be paying attention to how the dynamic on campus changes and how you feel about living here and what you do.
And while you’re living here, help us help you. Does someone on your floor cook a mean lasagna for everyone once a week? That might be a cool story for us.
Did someone beat everyone on your floor in Guitar Hero on expert, after drinking three 40s of…
Oh wait, there won’t be any drinking.
Yeah. Right.
The Horizon can help you voice your questions, concerns and praises, but we’ll also make sure to keep representing commuter students as well. After all, it’s what we’ve done for years, and we don’t plan on changing that.
By JEROD CLAPP
Senior Editor
jlclapp@ius.edu
