Editorial Cartoon by Melisa Vallovera
Sometimes, things happen and no one gets this better than the students of Montclair State University. In recent years, facility problems, such as spotty or weak wireless Internet, the inexcusable conditions in some residence halls as well as the electrical outage that occurred Tuesday morning, have plagued nearly every part of Montclair State. Time after time, students have sought change.
However, their concerns have commonly been met with this “things happen” attitude. As students’ troubles are continually shrugged off, they have become more aggravated, as those problems remain a part of their daily lives. Clearly, Montclair State needs to address all the problems that pop up and the quicker, the better.
Since the beginning of the year, no student has gone untouched by the problems that face Montclair State.
During the 2015 spring semester, some resident students were only able to take lukewarm showers as their rooms were often incapable of producing hot water. Of course, many students successfully contacted Montclair State staff in hope of correcting the problem, but informing the right people did not help the residents, since it took nearly the entire semester for anything to change.
It is obvious that students who pay increasingly high room and board costs should never have to deal with a hot water problem for an entire semester, when it could likely have been easily fixed.
But, regardless of how long it would have taken to fix, students should have been updated on the situation to know that their voices were heard and that steps were being taken to address the situation.
By giving updates, people would have been able to be more understanding of how long it would take to correct the issue. With a lack of updates, students eventually grew extremely impatient and unhappy.
Just this week, Montclair students faced another problem: a power outage. Once the power went out, the Montclair State community was notified. At 6:15 a.m., students received rave alert texts announcing the problem on campus and that PSE&G was already on campus working to address it.
Within the next half hour, students received another text with an update stating that the power on Clove Road had been restored and, soon afterward, another text was sent stating that all power had been restored to campus. The ordeal was over by 8:20 a.m, just two hours after the initial report.
Tuesday’s electrical outage should serve as a future model to all large-scale problems on campus. Everyone who is a part of the campus community was notified promptly of the situation and were updated in a timely manner. Not to mention, the electrical outage was addressed and solved in an extremely quick fashion.
Montclair State needs to use this example more often to address the general concerns of the community. Campus-wide notifications have proven to be a great way to distribute information on problems to the entire campus community effectively. Students would be much more understanding of any new obstacle if properly informed.
With the latest crisis being the terrible Wi-Fi connection on campus, Montclair State should work to recognize the concerns of the students and get out information about how they are working to solve it.
It is evident that Montclair State has found a system that works. In the future, hopefully Montclair State will utilize a method that will keep everyone in the loop and just a little bit happier because “Things Happen” does not need to be our new school motto.
