Moravian Cuts Lacrosse, Off-Campus Housing

When you’re a freshman at college you have to live in a dorm, this is pretty standard. After that, if you’re lucky, you can move your way up to some sort of suite, etc. Then, in your junior or senior year you can even live off campus with a bunch of dirty drunk guy friends of yours or spend time menstruating at the same time as seven other of your girlfriends.

Oh, and at college you can also participate in lacrosse, a great sport brought to us by the all the Native Americans we killed.

But, not at Moravian anymore..

For college student Bryan White, of Nazareth, living off campus is a rite of passage.

Unfortunately for him, it’s a rite he won’t experience at Moravian College. Next fall, all of the school’s students, excluding commuters, must live on campus.

College President Christopher M. Thomforde met with students Tuesday to announce that neither juniors nor seniors would be permitted to apply for off-campus housing in the future.

“It is really unfair for us as students,”said White, a 20-year-old junior. “We came here looking forward to living off campus.”

The policy change is intended to helpMoravian house 85 percent of its student body on campus by 2012. Reducing the number of students who live off campus is a recommendation outlined in the school’s 2006 “DREAM Commission” report.

Currently only about 85 Moravian students live off campus. Another 1,100 students live in college housing.

Last year, Moravian finished work on a 240-bed dormitory — the Hurd Integrated Living and Learning (HILL) Community. The completion moved the college closer to becoming a residential school.

Moravian junior Ellen Williams said she’d planned to live off campus and save money. Renting would have cost her about $5,200 including utilities, compared to $4,895 to $6,562 for Moravian housing.

“Students’ rights, opinions and thoughts were not put into any consideration in all of this,” said Williams.

Also announced recently are Moravian’s plans to end its men’s andwomen’s lacrosse programs. Source

Besides the awesome fun of living with other college students who don’t bathe much and leave pizza all over the place, the real reason you get off campus housing is to 1. state your independence just a bit and 2. get away from the raping the college does in the form of housing.

I understand that the college is in a bind just like any other “corporation” is and this is a good way to make sure that every student being schooled there is paying their dues…

But, cmon, don’t be such a dick. You’re a small college and your housing can be crammed and sub-par, it’s almost a courtesy to allow students to live off campus.

Well, hey, look at it this way, at least you can still pretend you go to Lehigh.