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First-year initiative gone
07/09/08
With Lisa Cornish now UCI's Housing director, the so-called "Graduate First-Year Initiative", GFYI, initiated by her predecessor Bill Zeller, is now done for.
From an email from the current AGS president:
In my conversation with Lisa Cornish last week the status of the GFYI came
up. Lisa has listened to the residents' councils (who have not favored
this program and its subsidizing from rent monies) and has agreed to NOT
hire to fill the vacancy. This in effect "kills" the GFYI program.
This sure is good news. I really hope that this is the start of housing working with the community representatives, not against them.
2 comments
I wonder if this will fix the “VdC problem". I, along with some of my friends who also live in VdC, are trying to escape the outrageous rent prices here and move into PV or Verano as part of the Guarantee we received coming here. When we were applying (in January, mind you), we were told that, as long as we met deadlines, we would be fine as far as housing went.
So the VdC leases end on Sept. 6th (ridiculous, yes) and we are not being told that housing will not even get to our applications (much less be able to fill them) until as late as October. So many of us our officially homeless for two months come the beginning of September.
Housing needs a HUGE overhaul. I really have no idea how an administrative department this disorganized has functioned at all in the past.
Well, the first-year initiative doesn’t have anything to do with the housing guarantee.
The first-year initiative was a kind of hand-holding. All these graduate students who made it successfully through college for their undergrad degree and who managed to get admitted to graduate school are obviously unable to handle living in graduate housing and need to be told by housing people how to go shopping, get around in town, etc. (end of sarcasm.)
It was a ridiculous waste of money, and for the people who may need orientation, e.g., foreign students, there is this established office called the International Center that handles these things already.
This whole thing was Bill Zeller’s idea, and it was the main reason he got hired here (after apparently failing with a similarly ridiculous plan at UMich.)
It is only fitting that this bad idea died with Bill being gone.
The housing guarantee if of course a whole other minefield. In fact, Mr. Zeller botched that, and that was pretty much what got him fired.
UCI simply doesn’t have enough graduate housing for the housing guarantee. And everybody knew that, but Mr. Zeller lied about being able to implement it.
The litmus test for Lisa Cornish will be how honest she is about the housing guarantee. To actually being able to guarantee housing, PV, Verano and VDC are not enough. They should implement an idea that, if I remember right, came from AGS: negotiate with the Irvine Company to get a block of apartments across from Campus and subsidize it. With Bill Zeller, AGS ran into a brick wall with this, but Lisa may be more open to the idea. We’ll see.
