Mold is only growing worse, endangering students.
The student population has known that there has been mold in Fisher Suites for many years. In fact, it appears that administration and housing officials have also known for a long time as well; students have presented the complaints and visible evidence of mold to those officials multiple times over the last few years. However, the administration refuses to solve the actual problem of the mold.
There is no shortage of students willing to share their stories. Adrian Warwick commented that “the mold often takes up large chunks of ceiling tiles … and is most often on several tiles.” He even went on to say that “some of my friends have found spare moldy tiles above the moldy tiles that currently make up their ceiling,” indicating that the school’s response was just to cover up the issue, which only made it much worse.
The school has taken very few steps to address either the mold or the concerns of students, with Grace Sims, a former resident of Fisher, saying that “the response from officials felt like a last-ditch effort to fix a problem they already knew about.” Sims was one of three students who, after alerting their proper housing officials of the mold problem in their suite, expected to have the mold cleaned up. Instead, Aschley Choate (manager of campus services) and Mark Bernhardt (director of housing and dining services), according to Sims, simply forced them to move in a very limited time span to a suite on a different floor. The new room, unsurprisingly, also had a mold problem, this time even worse than the original suite. When the three friends contacted housing officials once again, the only response they received was that they had to move into an apartment, something that they had not been preparing for, which obviously caused many logistical and financial problems.
Furthermore, the problem is very systematic, and according to Warwick and Sims almost always originates around the AC units in the Fisher Suites. The mold is “most likely from poor pipe insulation causing condensation,” added Sims, possibly as a cause of a larger problem with the infrastructure of Fisher Hall. But ultimately, the main issue is student safety. Warwick said that “after speaking with medical professionals, I confirmed the current level of mold exposure in [Fisher Suites], no matter the precautions taken … has at minimum a passive negative effect on people’s health, but it could be even worse for someone immunocompromised or allergic.” If the housing officials know of this risk, then they are blatantly ignoring the dangers that the mold poses to students and are prioritizing their finances over the safety of the students. And if they do not know of this risk, then they are negligent not only in understanding the problems that Fisher Suites has, but also in responding to the complaints of their students.
Currently, the Fisher Suites housing officials are failing the students who live there. They are not paying proper attention to the mold problem, whether they fully know the extent of it or not, and are choosing to inconvenience and possibly even harm students rather than actually address the mold in the suites. And as such, they are losing the trust of their students, who do not know what to expect from their officials other than an apparent disregard for the students’ health.
