LETTER: OC students should receive fair chance for Herring lot stickers
There are several lots around Rice that allow for parking close to the campus. These lots are classified as either college residential lots or as faculty/staff lots.
Some of the faculty/staff lots do not always get filled with faculty or staff, so, where there is excess room, students are often allowed to get a chance at them.
The Herring Hall lot, located behind Hanszen College, seems to have the most empty spaces, and thus, in order to fill these empty spaces with students, the Campus Police has sold the extra spaces on a first-come, first-serve basis.
This year, however, the Herring Hall lot stickers were given to the colleges so that the distribution of the lot spaces would be much more equitable.
It is this distribution that makes us question the role of colleges in handling distribution of excess faculty/staff stickers.
For example, at certain colleges, decisions were made to award the slots to only on-campus students. This decision was made without any input from off-campus students.
In fact, the off-campus representatives that should have been looking out for off-campus people were on-campus at the time of the jack due to the fact that turnover and elections for new representatives did not occur until late September. What was done in these cases was very unsatisfactory.
The prevailing logic was that it would only be consistent to treat these new Herring Hall lot spaces as college spaces, which, according to the constitution, can only be awarded to on-campus students since the stickers were given to the college.
There are two very wrong things with this logic: 1) the Herring Hall lot is treated very differently from a residential lot by the university, and the same rights and privileges given to a sticker-holder of a residential lot do not necessarily apply to faculty/staff lots; 2) if there was a conscious decision made in these cabinets to treat the Herring lot as a residential lot, then there should have been a special procedure to make binding the Constitution rules pertaining to the residential lot to the Herring lot.
One should not assume randomly that the regulations spelled out in the constitutions of these colleges specifically regarding residential lots can be arbitrarily applied to a very different Herring Hall lot without some special procedure allowing the entire college to know of this act.
We believe that the way that this issue was handled exemplifies the need for somebody other than the colleges to handle the distribution of stickers not taken up by faculty or staff.
Such methods, implemented at several residential colleges, overlooked many obvious principles, resulting in a system that was blatantly unfair to off-campus students.
For example, a student's eligibility to jack for parking privileges within the residential college system should be at least equal to that student's eligibility to jack for on-campus housing, especially when the parking spaces under consideration are not located in the residential college lot.
The Herring Hall lot is not a residential college parking lot; therefore, eligibility to park in the lot should not be contingent upon living in a residential college.
In addition, a preferential list for Herring Hall parking spots was created by the Campus Police, but later nullified, as the privilege of assigning Herring Hall spaces was delegated to designated colleges.
Allocating the authority to distribute parking spaces to the residential college courts was a reasonable idea in theory, but in practice, off-campus representation in the courts is a definite minority representation, and the interests of off-campus students are therefore not represented by majority vote.
It seems that a college court decision in the best interest of all college members would take into account the fact that, while some on-campus students only need to use their cars two or three times during the week, off-campus students often must use their cars two or three times per day.
College court members, however, obviously tend to base their votes more on their personal best interest than on the interest of creating policies that are equally fair, in principle, to all college members.
In short, for the allotment of parking spaces to proceed fairly, it is incumbent upon us to develop a system that will give off-campus students an equal opportunity to jack for the empty faculty/staff lots on campus.
For most things, seniority is the distinguishing factor upon which certain privileges are based. It seems, for this university to remain consistent, we should utilize this factor, and this factor only, in the allotment of parking spaces.
It is absolutely ludicrous that in some cases sophomore students are given the privilege of parking close-in to campus, while seniors who happen to like living off-campus have to suffer the inconvenience of walking from the stadium lot to get to their classes.
Elizabeth Green
WRC '97
Snehal Patel
Hanszen '97
Karey Tsang
Hanszen '97
(and 19 other Brown, Lovett and WRC students)
This item appeared in the Opinion section of the October 6, 1995 issue.
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