The new admissions building is spacious and modern and bright. The redesigned CUB glitters in the sunlight, a beautiful glass structure with all of the volume and institutionalized style that previous iterations of the Bullet Hole and Commons lacked. These new buildings are now staples on the Gettysburg College campus tour.
Student tour guides lead wide-eyed high school seniors across the grounds, toting the beauty of the campus and all of the new amenities like these. For many of these high school seniors, the display works, and they ultimately attend Gettysburg. That is the keyword: display. The new admissions building and CUB are admittedly nice, but all of the gorgeous new architecture is merely a facade. Gettysburg is luring students in by presenting a lovely exterior, knowing that once students pay their deposit, many will feel it is too late to back out when they discover what is lurking underneath.
Black mold in the air vents. Sludge dripping down the walls. Strange, smelly stains on the ceilings. Water spurting from light fixtures. Foam pouring from the laundry room piping. Termite infestations. These are only a few of the facilities issues in the residence halls at Gettysburg College, ranging from freshman housing in Hanson Hall to the supposedly “best” upperclassmen housing in Apple Hall and the Quarry suites.
via Abigail Winston, ’19
On its own, these facilities issues would be bad enough. Gettysburg charges nearly $67,500 per year, and for students who require loans to attend, this figure can skyrocket to $80,000 or more after interest. Given the amount of money students are charged, it is not asking too much to expect living facilities which are clean and won’t make students ill.
What makes this situation even worse as that Gettysburg College administration and facilities don’t seem to care. On August 24, an email was sent to the student body informing them that visual inspections had been conducted in all residence halls and that any issues were resolved. James Biesecker wrote that the college even expanded the scope of their mold investigation, and that any health hazards were addressed. Yet as soon as students returned to campus, they began to spot health hazards. Numerous apartments in Quarry and Apple Halls have mold in the air vents.
via author
In Haaland Hall, one of the Quarry suites, nearly every apartment had some degree of mold growth on the air vents. When it was reported, the college was initially slow to act. In my apartment, despite the green spores clearly being mold, facilities told me it was only dust. As more reports of mold poured in, I tagged Gettysburg College publicly in photos of the mold in my vents and filed a complaint at DPS. In the face of all of this, facilities eventually conceded that there was a mold issue in Haaland Hall and is currently working to resolve it.
Yet why did it take facilities so long to admit there was mold and work to treat the problem? The email students received on August 24 appears dishonest, since the mold in Haaland’s air vents was clearly visible and present on nearly every vent in numerous apartments. Even a cursory visual inspection should have revealed the presence of mold.
This is only one of the many facilities issues on the campus. Also in Haaland Hall, a student turned on the light in her apartment to discover water spurting from the fixture. In Paxton Hall, termites swarmed in a corner of the triple, and when the issue was reported to facilities, they merely put duct tape over the cracks in the wall through which the termites were emerging. The problem raged on for an entire semester, and at the time of this writing, appears only solved because the species of termite has gone back into stasis.
Gettysburg College has the funds to fix these health hazards. Not only do students pay an utterly absurd sum in tuition and housing, but the College brags about the amount of money it has raised through its Gettysburg Great campaign. It raised 160 million. It is sitting upon piles of savings that it could be using to improve living conditions.
So how does the College justify spending millions to erect the new CUB and admissions buildings when its students are living in unsafe, or at the very least uncomfortable and unacceptable, housing? The expansion to the admissions building was added almost entirely because it provides a place for prospective students and their families to sit, rather than taking them to one of the lecture halls on campus. The College shows more concern for the prospective students it is trying to attract than its actual, matriculated student body.
The way Gettysburg treats its students in unacceptable. Its prioritization of drawing in new students over the welfare of its current students is ridiculous, and the only way anything will change is if we raise enough hell.