Inquiring Minds: A few suggestions for becoming a better on-campus community

A new residence hall and a new requirement that students remain on campus all four years equal an important opportunity.

With a St. Davids campus consisting mainly of students who live, work, eat, sleep and play primarily on campus comes a need to make that campus a home.

If students are not happy at the prospect of living on campus for four years, they may go elsewhere. Eastern, to keep its students, must convince students that living on campus is as good as living off.

Part of living off campus involves having choices.

Eastern has made an excellent start toward making the campus a place where students want to live.

Eastern has improved one kind of choice with Sodexho’s introduction of the Good to Go meals, which allow students to grab a pre-made meal from the Dining Commons without paying Eagle Dollars.

We also applaud the idea under consideration to provide shuttles to certain train stations because this arrangement, if adopted, would give students without cars the option of getting in and out of Philadelphia and surrounding towns more easily.

Even little things like coin machines make residence life more pleasant and convenient, because they make the little things like doing laundry less of a hassle.

At the same time, we want to encourage Eastern to more fully embrace the opportunities available to improve campus life.

Perhaps the most important action Eastern could take toward making on-campus life more appealing is to increase SAB’s budget. The $36,500 budget SAB has, according to Kevin Maness, inspires creativity, but creativity has its limits, and students want more activities.

One way to do this could be to add a $10 charge to students’ semester bill. An extra $10 a student a semester would equal over $10,000 toward an increased SAB budget a semester. Or $20, 30…

Since students also leave campus in order to cook for themselves, Eastern could add more kitchens, with pots, pans and stoves.

A final suggestion is that Eastern put a gaming/social room on campus. A pool table, pingpong table, big screen television, arcade games, tables, even a snack machine, would provide a nice place for students to congregate on weekends and in their spare time. It could also provide a good area to televise big sporting events.

The important thing is that Eastern continue to become a place students will want to call home while they are in college.

Inquiring Minds is the collective opinion of the editorial staff and not necessarily representative of the entire staff. It is written by the managing editor and the editor-in-chief.