Normally, I write these opening letters every semester as a welcoming statement for new students, potential writers, and the rest of the campus in general. Today, I don’t really feel like welcoming the rest of the campus because frankly, I’m tired of Stony Brook. I don’t really like it here, and I don’t know why students get suckered into coming to this place. Read further and I’ll explain my disgust.
The administrators always say that we have some kind of ‘Red Hot’ campus. Sure there’s a lot of building going on, but that’s necessary to quell the overcrowding. SAT scores are rising, but they rose from about 1000 to 1250. We still can’t compete with the nation’s best universities. We have achieved absolutely nothing.
The problem here, at SBU, is the student’s expectations are so low, that any little improvement is hailed as a big accomplishment. We now have a greener atmosphere as noted by the added flora around main campus. Wow, it took about 48 years for someone to realize that we should have students live in a nice environment.
And still, we have the entire freshmen class living in tripled dormitories to the point where campus residences had to ask certain students living in the surrounding area to become commuters. Whose idea was it to admit this many more students? The administration claimed that there was an increased demand in housing over the past several years, something that that is being dealt with by other universities. Friends, let me say that the solution to our housing troubles is to admit fewer freshmen one year, or as many years as it takes to build the extra housing. Even then, there’s no guarantee that there will be enough housing to quell the ‘demand’ for SB.
I don’t understand the entire reasoning behind all the decisions that have been made, but rest assured, this coming academic year, the campus is going to be packed. We won’t have any room to move during peak hours. For all I know, the SAC lines will have to start outside the building. When we sleep at night, we’ll hear the freshmen below us and above us, taking over the campus. This is the SB we live in, not the ‘Red Hot’ SB that’s presented to unsuspecting freshmen.
The food here is too expensive, the books in the bookstores are brand new but they’re way too expensive as well. As I wrote on the front page, we can buy our books used and new elsewhere at much better prices without all those extra unnecessary study guides they package together to increase the cost.
There is such a lack of interest in the Undergraduate Student Government here. With all the controversy from last semester with hate crimes and the Men’s Rugby team needing disciplinary action that I can only hope that USG will resurface as a prominent, fair-minded organization with enough student interest. To do that, we need USG to make a concerted effort to improve its image.
Yes, SB is a great public institution. You get a good value for your education. But unfortunately, the undergraduate campus I don’t think will ever exceed the expectation of being a public institution. We’ll just be SB, not MIT, Yale, Columbia, Northwestern, Johns Hopkins, Brown, etc. Unless as an undergraduate unit, we make the attempt to strive for excellence, to remove ourselves from the shadow of the post-undergraduate schools on campus as intellectuals, things aren’t going to change here, ever.
