UCI On-Campus Housing Problems

Sorry, Steve, but I strongly disagree.
This has nothing to do with quarantines. And it doesn’t have anything to do with “protecting public health,” either.
It has everything to do with scare-mongering.
People have had “flu-like symptoms” for years, and have managed just fine without this ridiculous and tasteless tagging.
And what if sick people continue to go to classes, or shopping (everybody needs food, right?)

So, this tagging doesn’t help anything, it serves no purpose whatsoever, other than stigmatizing. And *that’s* what the Nazi-style tagging was. So, my comparison stands.

Ridiculous! Not the notice, but your comparison of it to Nazi tagging. The university has a legal responsibility to protect the public health and is empowered to enforce quarantines. A request to provide notice to visitors is not as much as they could do, and seems to me to be a reasonable response intermediate between failing their responsibility by doing nothing and more draconian measures like housing sick students separate from non-sick students. No one will get fired over this.

A notice of illness does not prevent people from entering an apartment but gives them information to let them make their own decisions. Personally, I care about the people who visit me and I think it’s my responsibility to give them notice if I’m contagious to let them.

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.

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.

I agree. Lisa Cornish is one of the few competent people in housing.
Unfortunately, way too often she has to stomp out the fires that the incompetence of others in housing start…

Denise,
I suggest that you contact Lisa Cornish immediately.

Hi Denise,
Sorry to hear about this.
The best way is to get the PV Residents Council involved (pvrc at uci.edu).
You are not the only one to have these kinds of problems, even a PVRC member had roommate assignment issues.

Hi Joe,
I’ve enjoyed your blog since I started at UCI last fall… appreciate the efforts you made while you were here. I hope this overhaul really happens, but I have little faith.

I have a great little story about the incredibly competent UCI staff… and I hope it will help those who read and maybe criticize these blogs to better understand our frustrations. I’m currently up late gathering documentation against housing in an attempt to handle the situation I’m currently in…

I’m in a 3 bdr at PV housing, only 2 of us at present. About a month ago my roommate and I received an assignment for a third roommate, but the women failed to ever contact us and we received an email that she had lost her spot on the waiting list. However, PV continued to then forward this girl and my current roommate updates about turning over the old room and mysteriously lost any documentation that I lived in the apartment.
Today at about 5:10 pm I received an incoherent email from PV Offices with some bizarre lecture about moving to graduate school being so stressful and forgetting to contact people and indicating some woman was driving from up North and would contact us???
Anyways, this is the first indication I’ve received about getting another applicant. Confused, I called my current roommate who informed me that this woman who we have never heard about entered our apartment, (while she was taking a nap, to add to her shock), and began moving into the unit. I did not even know her name let alone anything else about her, except that she smokes and we are both quite allergic. PV is conveniently closed for the day and all I hear is Kerri Sherwood will contact us sometime tomrrow.
(But luckily I’ll be in that office right at 8 am to raise hell.)
I’d like to know how this can be legal? I’d go as far to say it is grossly immoral to impose such a situation on anyone, especially when we students have our time and energies so stretched. To say PV has dropped the ball cannot even begin to describe this mess I’m in.
All the best to you and others reading this…

And if you are indeed a new grad student, you should be interested in making UCI a better place. THAT’s what this blog is all about. Like everybody else, I would have preferred the administration to listen to graduate students. We have tried that for years, and there has been some progress, but unfortunately only after prolonged yelling at them.
In fact, I was one of the people who started the Palo Verde Residents Council, to actually represent graduate students living in Palo Verde, and work with the housing administration for the betterment of Palo Verde residents.
So, contrary to your assertion, I actually have a very positive view of the world. I still believe that it is possible to make UCI better. To make things better, the bad stuff need to be known.

Well, it seems it is you who needs to go “into the real world.”
My beef is with the administration. The academic side of the university is fine. I wish I could say the same thing about the administration. But people in the administration, in particular in on-campus housing, have repeatedly lied to my face. And I am not willing to sweep that under the rug.

I’m an incoming UCI Grad student and will be moving into PV this September. If you are so unhappy with UCI, why are you obtaining your degree there? I personally am excited about attending UCI and completing my graduate work there. Folks like you devalue your degree over your own pessimistic view of the world. Instead, go out into the real world and make a name for UCI with what you’ve learned.

Some more history: The June 2002 “Tent City", i.e., graduate students living in tents in Aldrich Park in May/June 2002 was what resulted in the agreement with the university that people who lived in Graduate Housing before June 2002 would not be subject to term limits.
AGS did the negotiations with UCI Student Affairs at that time, and Manuel Gomez, the Vice Chancellor for Student Affairs, guaranteed that there would be no term limits for students who lived in Graduate Housing before June 2002.

Well, I no longer live in PV, so I don’t get all the info regarding the PVRC elections.
I’ll write a little note, though.

OK, so this is all interesting, and we could have a debate if we wanted about this specific issue. Usually I agree with you, but not so sure on this one. But what I really want to know is, who are you supporting or endorsing for the upcoming PVRC elections? Can I put in a special request for a blog post about that?

Seriously, the rent at PV is way over the top. First of all,
we graduate students are leaving lucrative jobs and coming to univs
to do research and on top of that we have to pay through our nose for
rents. This is totally unfair. And I see a bias towards VP by housing.

Use the vault.php script on palo-verde.org. The limit is 1GB/file :-).

Yeah, but the blog software has filesize upload limits.

Scanning the pages in higher resolution would make them readable.