The cost of attending PUC for one academic year is $35,616. Out of that large amount of money, $4,380 is allotted for dormitory fees. The combined seven dorms on campus contain 603 student rooms. This year there are 1,105 students who live in the dorms, as confirmed by PUC Student Services. That means that the combined tuition fees for all current residence hall students that were collected by PUC are approximately $4,839,900 for dorm fees alone this year.* That is the raw fiscal data and, as a student, certain implications can be extrapolated from it. I fully understand that dorms require money allotments to remain functional: electricity, water, equipment, etc. However, I cannot comprehend as to why our dorms have such lagging maintenance repair timelines.
In Grainger Hall the third floor has had a broken water fountain since the beginning of fall quarter. It has been reported to maintenance several times and alas, the residents are still parched. I am not the only student that recognizes the lack of maintenance. It has become the laughing stock of the dorm and is the landing spot for printed out memes and jokes that mock the fact that the fountain is still broken after such an extended period of time. I am not an accounting major, but I hypothesize that we can afford a new water fountain. That is just a fraction of the dorm related complaints that I hear that can be easily fixed. Should I even bring up the fact that Grainger has only one dryer that works? No, that one is fun, I love waiting in line for several hours to make sure my clothes aren’t soaked. Water fountain aside, as inconvenient as broken appliances are, there are actual safety issues in play that need to be addressed.
The morning of May 10th, freshman social work major Emilio Castillo was rushed to the emergency room because the top bunk of his bed fell through the frame and landed on his head, causing a concussion. Castillo was laying on the bottom bed when his friend shifted his weight on top and the boards slipped through the space, proceeding to crash down. Upon further examination, the bed boards that support the weight of the top bunk were too short for the frame. This means that with certain movements, disasters can and have happened because the beds have inadequate parts on them. When asked about the event, Castillo recalled the experience by saying, “No one really expects a bunk bed to fall on your head, much less in your dorm, that’s that stuff you see in movies. It was just really unlucky, you know? I’m glad it was just a mild concussion though, it could have been a lot worse.” With dangerous incidents happening that could be prevented by simple dorm upgrades, I feel the dorms need more financial attention brought to them.
I am not asking for PUC to build us new dorms, that is unrealistic and unwarranted. However, I do feel as if the exorbitant amount of money that the dorm fees amount to needs to be spent in a way that reflects the needs of the students. As students, we need to report every broken item in the dorm to maintenance, because I am aware that sometimes we see inadequacies and just complain without taking the proper steps to finding a solution. The school, on the other hand, needs to either hire more maintenance workers or prioritize fixing dorm appliances and features, because if PUC spent as much time fixing the dorms as they do planting flowers on every inch of this campus, the dorms would be in satisfactory condition.
*All financial and dorm figures were obtained from the official PUC website.
(Grainger Third Floor Watering Hole)
davidohair 
Yes! This is really good. I was on duty when Emilio got hurt… I agree, we only have one full-time men’s dorm maintenance worker, and these dorms aren’t getting any younger! We’ve got to hire another one, and also fix the broken water fountain on Newton 3rd floor, too!
I think I do need to clarify that, as the RA who took care of the situation with Emilio, that this situation did not have anything to do with inadequate funding, and certainly not inadequate maintenance staff. In fact, the problem had occurred several times before this, but the residents hadn’t reported it until months later when someone actually got hurt. Although repairs don’t always take place when I wish they did, I think lots of times if people would report things earlier, things would get done faster, and frustrations would be avoided later on.
Having worked for PUC during the 2012 summer (doing ITSS infrastructure maintenance), the things that you can see are the least of your worries. Practically every inch of PUC’s buildings are covered in what we called “situation seven”. “Situation seven” is an euphemism for asbestos. If you look up at the ceilings and see a white granular texture, that’s asbestos. Most of main water pipes are insulated with asbestos. Some of the walls are insulated with asbestos.There’s asbestos under the floors. A decent amount of pipes under Winning that lead to the female bathroom in the lobby leak, which leaves the most “pleasant” of odors. The catacombs underneath are even worse. There’s actually a tunnel that goes under the parking lot between the library and Graf that is condemned. It’s so dangerous that we were not allowed in there because there was good possibility that it could have fallen on us. Some of the tunnels are actually partially flooded with flowing streams in them because they’re built under the water table.
The thing is that everybody that does maintain PUC tries exceptionally hard. Some of the guys that I worked with at ITSS stayed after hours trying to accomplish more and go unpaid. Some of them actually consider their jobs to be their mission to support Christ’s message. The problem is that we experienced a lot of sidetracking because a department head or a dean demanded that their problem or, more often than not, their pet project was more important than everything else that needs to be done. We actually spent a part of two or three weeks trying to fix a phone line for dean Woods’ office, which only took that long because we couldn’t get in there due to her doing something “more important than you [us]” than what we were doing. This was time that we needed for rewiring the second floor off Paulin Hall (some of the offices there didn’t have phone or internet lines). A lot of the staff at PUC are great, but there’s more than a few squeaky wheels that complain exceptionally loudly.