STAFF EDIT: Housing must cut red tape

This week's Hamilton House fiasco is only the most recent chapter in extensive volume of poor communication between Boston University Housing, the Office of Residence Life and their residents. It was just last semester when a glitch in the line of communication in ORL left hundreds of students on Bay State Road in the dark for eight hours during a planned power outage. Now, an unknown number of Hamilton House residents who selected "internal selection" must reconsider their options.

Housing Director Marc Robillard's decision to provide these residents with the best housing lottery numbers is a fair compensation for them, but ultimately only stirs the great mess that housing has become. The housing lottery, purported to be the fairest way to distribute housing assignments, is skewed by moving these residents to the front of the line. And a few students at the head of the line does not seem like much until you watch the perfect room disappear from the screen in front of you at room selection. While the first-round pick is great for ex-residents of Hamilton House, sophomores doomed to a second year in Warren Towers to will have trouble mustering an appreciation for their good luck.

The Office of Housing has no excuse for not communicating with residents earlier. By waiting to "make sure" before informing students, the university essentially choose to gamble with their housing options. Though housing is a massive and complicated ordeal, its complexity is no excuse for not communicating with students in a timely manner, before important decisions must be made. When Bay State Road was left in the dark last semester, the university blamed the bureaucracy of ORL for failing to communicate the information through the organization down to students. It seems that red tape may be to blame again - there is no other conceivable reason why the Office of Housing would not foresee the impending construction project and instantly think to give students a heads up.

The line of communication between students and administrators must be unclogged of the red tape that has repeatedly left students in the dark.