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All students deserve housing — WashU’s policies disagree
“Is there anything else you want to tell me?” I asked. After holding back tears throughout our interview, the student began to cry. She explained that she had endured housing and food insecurity multiple times in her life. When she was evicted from her WashU housing, however, it was different.
“In the past, I was with my family,” she said. “I was with people that I could share this struggle with and also get really intimate support from. And this time I was in St. Louis, 2,000 miles away from home, and I think that’s what made it so much worse.”
This student — who wishes to remain anonymous for privacy reasons — is low-income and first-generation. In this article, she will be referred to as Sophia.
Sophia was one of 23 students who were arrested during the April 27 pro-Palestine encampment and temporarily suspended the following day. The administration notified protesters of the suspension in an email on April 28. The email stated, “Effective immediately, you are no longer permitted on campus,” which included all University-owned property. Six of the arrested students lived in WashU housing. All were kicked out of their homes that day and given until 8 p.m. to find a backup plan.
My intention is not to take a stance on the protests that occurred last spring. Regardless of what you believe about the Israel-Palestine conflict or civil disobedience, the temporary suspension policies at WashU are dangerous and disproportionately harm low-income students. I spoke to three of the six students who were removed from their housing on April 28. Two were first-generation and all three were low-income, relying on the University for their housing and meals.
These students’ experiences should matter to you regardless of what you think about their actions. We should all consider housing and food a human right, but currently, WashU’s policies do not.
University officials have the authority to evict students through the Student Conduct Code and the Office of Residential Life’s Terms and Conditions. According to the Conduct Code, the administration can temporarily suspend students on the grounds of a student conduct offense, criminal charge, or a “substantial threat to the ability of others to continue their normal University events and activities.” Administrators may prohibit or restrict their access to University-owned property in “cases of substantially disruptive or dangerous behavior.”
Residential Life’s Terms and Conditions state that the University can change the status of a student’s housing “for any reasons the University deems appropriate,” including “pending disciplinary action” and “noncompliance with University or Residential Life policies.”
These policies reach beyond the scope of the suspensions after April 27. WashU administrators have the authority to evict students from housing based on subjective criteria and without an investigation, conduct hearing, or confirmation that the student has somewhere to go. As long as this remains the case, they can forcibly remove students according to their own interpretation of what constitutes a “threat,” “disruption,” or “danger.”
Administrators need to assess how their biases impact the way they interpret certain acts as more dangerous or disruptive than others. For example, if we consider what is “substantially disruptive or dangerous,” we might ask how often the school takes such measures when students are accused of sexual assault or use a slur against someone in class. Why do we see such decisive action from the school in some situations and silence in others?
I do not mean to say we should revoke these policies altogether. In the case that someone is a serious threat, they are pivotal to the safety and well-being of the WashU community. However, the policies should guarantee that all students get housing based on their individual circumstances, such as off-campus housing, a University-funded apartment, a hotel, or a plane ticket home.
The WashU administration must outline a more transparent decision process for how to handle temporary suspensions. Suspensions should not be purely punitive, but rather must take the necessary steps to protect community members and support suspended students. They must consider what measures will pose the least disruption or danger to the suspended students themselves, with particular attention to students from vulnerable communities.
Temporary suspensions occur in the interim period prior to a student conduct hearing, meaning there should be an especially high threshold for determining which actions require extreme measures. For students who go through this decision process and still get moved off campus, the policies must outline a process to transition them off of campus with a guarantee of housing, food, and sufficient time to move. Temporary suspension should not give WashU the right to stop supporting students’ well-being and survival.
In my conversation with Rob Wild, the Associate Vice Chancellor and Dean of Students, he said that the administration does not take temporary suspension lightly. He explained that they try to almost always have a “bridge conversation” with students who are moved out of housing. These conversations include questions about whether students have temporary housing options like flying home or staying with a friend.
“You could imagine that back in April of this year, we would have done [the bridge conversation] with anybody that … allegedly would have lost their right to live in housing on a very case-by-case basis,” Wild said. He explained that administrators try their best to provide resources for students who need it, like moving them to alternative off-campus housing or providing community-run emergency housing resources.
The three students I spoke to told me a very different story. In their cases, there were no “bridge conversations.”
Class of 2024 graduate Nash Overfield, who was temporarily suspended last spring, said that WashU administration did not offer to help at any point in the process. After moving out on April 28, Overfield stayed with friends for two days before living in a professor’s spare room for the two weeks leading up to graduation. Overfield described the nine hours of moving off campus as stressful and frantic, as he quickly threw his stuff into boxes which he distributed among different friends’ houses for storage.
Similarly, administrators did not speak to the other two students I interviewed about their plan for housing or food. Sophia recalled, “the only reason quite a few people were still able to … purchase meals and groceries or stay anywhere was because of professors or other people from the St. Louis community that were either donating or offering up their spare bedrooms. But from the administration, we didn’t get anything.”
When asked for his response to these students’ claims, Wild said, “If a student shared with Residential Life that they needed assistance, we would have addressed that at the time.”
Temporarily suspended students can appeal their decisions within five days. All of the students I spoke to met with Wild over a week after they were evicted and none of the interviewees remember speaking about housing. Wild confirmed that none of the six students “raised concerns” about their housing.
When the students were removed from housing on April 28, all they knew was that they had until 8 p.m. to move off campus. The letter notifying them of the temporary suspension said nothing about resources or assistance for housing, only providing counseling resources because “the news of this temporary suspension may be upsetting to [them].” Students should not be expected to ask for help from the people who removed them from their housing in the first place.
Of the three students I talked to, all relied on the meal plan they received through financial aid or a scholarship to eat. “And all of a sudden I was just out of that,” Overfield said.
Wild said that the school reimbursed all of the students’ remaining balances of their meal points by May 2, five days after they were temporarily suspended. In the meantime, Overfield explained that he depended on financial support from mutual aid and some friends to get his food.
“I sort of just tried to ration,” Sophia said. The final student I talked to expressed similar stress over food insecurity during this time, relying on their friends to buy them food with their meal points and bring it off campus.
Rob Wild explained that the administration is conscious that students may differ in financial situations when they are kicked off campus.
“We try to remember that all of our students are still our students in situations like this and everybody’s situation is different,” he said. “This whole idea of housing insecurity is real, and so we have a lot of capacity with our team to work on a case-by-case basis with students when they’re housing insecure, either for conduct or other reasons, to make sure that there are resources that are provided.”
I do not doubt that these are genuine considerations for administrators. However, the disconnect between their intentions and the experiences of temporarily suspended students reveals the flaws in these temporary suspension policies.
The explicit guarantee of access to housing for temporarily suspended students is necessary to keep WashU administrators accountable. Without this provision, administrators can forgo “bridge conversations” amidst the chaos of temporary suspensions.
WashU must detail a guaranteed process for temporarily suspended students in its conduct policies. If administrators decide that a student’s removal from housing is necessary, which should be a last resort, they must guarantee that students will retain some form of University-funded housing and food. Additionally, students should never be treated like those suspended on April 28.
When I asked Sophia how her eviction made her feel, she said, “Mostly, I felt really betrayed, because I consider this like a second home, and… a lot of us were just sort of discarded, like we didn’t even matter to the school anymore… And I just felt like the school doesn’t really value us as much as they had told me they did.”
WashU students do not stop being WashU students when they break the rules or cause a disruption. They do not stop being people who need food to eat and a place to live. Yet under the current policies, they lose their humanity in the eyes of our institution.
Editor’s Note: This article was updated on 10/7/24 to fix a minor grammatical error.