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Housing
disgrace
Th9 married student housing situation on this
campus is a disgrace.
UNL provides only 57 apartments for married
students, which puts Big Red in the sub-basement
compared with other Big 8 schools. Iowa State
University maintains 2,000 apartments for its married
students.
And so it's incredible that this glaring housing
inadequacy was overlooked when the Board of
Regents approved $300,450 for residence hall
improvements at its January meeting.
The plan is aimed at making dormitories more
palatable to students-single students, that is. The
money is to be used for carpeting floor lounges;
public lounges; tecreation, study and programming,
and other miscellaneous projects.
Placing such non-essential improvements ahead of
married student housing indicates wrong priorities or
at least an oversight by the regents.
Only about 2 per cent of married students are
housed in the on-campus furnished apartments, which
rent for S80 to $90 a month including utilities. The
other married students are shortchanged-they cannot
live in single-student residence halls; they usually have
u pay hiyher rent and often live at inconvenient
distances horn campus.
The shortage coincides with a low-income housing
crunch in Lincoln. Single students might be faulted
tor snapping up the inexpensive apartments-10.8 per
cent of available single-student dormitory space is
unaligned -but married students have no choice.
About 200 names are on a 15-month waiting list for
the 57 units. In any case, some low-income families
;.-e hard pressed to find iow-income housing.
The University should realize its responsibility
both to the community and to married students.
Cosmetic dormitory improvements should take a
hack seat tj augmenting the number of married
student accommodations. Married students without
children should be allowed to occupy empty
dormi tory rooms. The rent, assuming the couple eats
in trie cafeteria, would have to be worked out.
It's probably too late to suggest that the $300,450
bo recalled and used instead to renovate unused space
in singles dormitories for marrieds or to purchase
alternate housing for them. The money also could
be set asM.te for building married student housing in
the future. Rut more money most likely i available
comewhttrr. The $300,450 was pulled from a
University controlled reserve fund generated mostly
through student fees and board and room payments.
If there was any red tape involved, t wasn't made
public.
Mary voboril y
R, AGN6W
f i
"POWERFUL PRESSURE OfiSAHi ZMIOMS... ARE WAGING- MASSIVE ...
in
Farmingtonian test
big Brown beer bust
Every year in Farmingtnn, a somewhat indistinct nation in the
Caucasus, a festival is celebrated. Called, variously, the festival of
Beer, Parliament and Seven Nights of Wild Parties, the festival is
field in winter, beginning on the first Tuesday after tho solstice or
the first Monday after the second Wednesday after Santa Glaus
comes, whichever is first.
The festival convenes in a giant auditorium. As many as
15.000 Farmingtonians have been known to get together. A largo
hammer at one end of the auditorium is raised by four men (or
10 or however many it takes), dropped again with a resounding
thud, someone yells "Ready, gol" and the festival begins.
All the Famingtonians start drinking and yelling at each other.
Every purson who comes to the festival brings enough beer, wine
or gin for 70 to 80 persons. Often the Farmingtonian carries with
him a volume of trivia, ammunition with which to fuel his
rhetorical fires. The festival is always successful, because every
one who wants to attend does, and every one who doesn't,
doesri't. A lot of Farmingtonians do make it.
And well they might, for the Festival of Beer is the
government of Farmington, and here is where great questions of
policy are decided. There is no organization, no structure, no
voting, just a lot of swearing, name calling and nonsense. The
only way to really understand it is by talking to someone who has
attended. I've never been there, but a friend of mine has.
"What can possibly corne of a week of drinking and
swearing?" I asked urgently.
"Well," he said, "they just get together and argue. After about
a week the juice is all gone and they sober up and go home."
keith londgrer
me remedies
"But-but who runs th government? Who keeps things
moving? Who gets things done?" I asked incredulously.
"Nobody. They just go home and mind their own business. It
all seemed pretty weird to me, too, but it seems to work."
From what he says, Farmington is a strange place, with its own
way of doing things. We'll be hearing more about Farmington thi
semester, as soon as I hear from my correspondent again.
There probably will be some other stuff in this space, but
before I get started I'd like to comment on football.
That whole business of having a head for a mascot had a lot of
us at Casey s pretty confused. Some of the shuffleboard players
were going to apply for the job, thinking they'd be as qualified as
any other heads to run around at halftime.
But then it turned out that the "head" was just a papier-mache
bust of George Brown and everyone decided to forget h. Who
wants to be a papier-mache bu?,t of George Brown?
page A
daily nebraskan
Wednesday, january 23, 1974
