Tuesday, January 12, 2016

On Duquesne, Dougherty, and Dumb Dorm Decrees


The President is certainly leaving with a bang.

Not Obama, mind you, but Charles Dougherty, the president of my alma mater, Duquesne University. (Go Dukes!) Dougherty wraps up his third and final term later this year, and he’s exiting in a blaze of glory. Hold on, wait, I messed that up. What’s the opposite of “glory?” Shame? Despicableness? Thesaurus.com says “ill repute.” I kind of like that one.

Sure, Dougherty said some supportive stuff about Muslims in the wake of the Paris attacks, so cool. Good work, man. Now let’s get back to his open contempt/apathy for the student body as President.

So back in October, Dougherty spoke to the University’s faculty and addressed the growing number of students who leave dormitories for off-campus housing. Instead of citing, say, the greater cost of living on campus vs. off campus, or even giving a completely non-commital non-statement like “We’re exploring the reasons for this,” Dougherty decided to Prince Philip this one and state that students only move off campus because they like drinking and having sex a whole lot.

Three things about that:
  1. Hell yeah.
  2. The news editor of the Duquesne Duke student newspaper (for which I wrote and edited for three years in college) was in attendance. Did nobody decide to clue Dougherty in on that? Maybe a quick, “Hey, the organization that is almost exclusively geared towards student and school interests has a reporter here, maybe don’t say anything bad about their main readership this time” would have done the trick.
  3. But seriously, Mardi Gras every weekend? Hell yeah.


Dougherty and team issued a half-assed apology afterwards, but hey: at that point, there were only eight more months in the Dougherty tenure, so what else could go wrong?

Well, as it turns out, there’s a little bitty Duquesne residence policy which states that, if your dormitory roommate doesn’t show up or leaves the dorm partway through the year, the University can charge you for the other portion of rooming costs if you don’t find a roommate on your own. Fortunately, the school provided students with a full nine days (!) after the beginning of the spring semester to find someone who they could feasibly live with for four months who also a. did not already have their living situation sorted out, or b. also had an abandoned roommate. Woo hoo!

It makes sense that the school wants to consolidate rooms and cut some of its potential losses from heating/cooling/lighting two rooms with one student apiece vs. one room with two students. But the logic and the optics of this series of decisions is amusing in just how poorly the school’s policy meshes with its public image.

Less than three months after the University president blames students’ desire for a “libertine” lifestyle for their drop in room and board revenue, the school then decides to stick with a policy that punishes students who do stay on campus (or who are given no choice by school policy) by sticking them with more of the bill…which they wouldn’t have to front had their roommate not left, which might not have happened if the University decided to produce a more competitive housing product in terms of quality and cost.


This can’t all be reasonably placed at Dougherty’s feet – I couldn’t tell you if he was responsible for the inane housing policy – but after those comments from October, it’s safe to say he doesn’t have a ton of opposition towards the policy. With only a few months left in his tenure, it might be a bad look to take a vacation, but after all the public pressure on him and the University over the past few months, it could be time to Dougherty to take a mid-winter vacation. Might I suggest New Orleans? They’re having a big party next month that he might enjoy…

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