Just a few weeks removed from winter break and into the start of the spring semester, students from the first floor of Jonathan Hall were surprised to learn that they would all have to find a new place to live.
“I found out from my roommate, who heard it from our RA,” said one First Jonathan student who wished to remain anonymous due to concerns of repercussions from the CUC administration. “We got an email a few days later, but it didn’t say a lot. It just said that we needed to find a new place to live in the next few days and be moved in a week after that.”
Every spring, CUC undergoes housing consolidation. When students come back after winter break, the housing department takes stock of how many people who lived in housing during the first semester are not living in on-campus housing for the spring semester. This can be as a result of students graduating early, leaving to perform student teaching, or transferring to another school.
Housing consolidation is usually based around new students being placed, people that used to have roommates receiving new ones, and students that were on the Concordia Hall wait list getting moved into CUC’s newest dorm building.
First Jonathan normally operates as guest housing, not student housing. Guest speakers, visiting professors, and family members of CUC professors can stay in guest housing when visiting. However, the school was forced to make a change for the 2025 fall semester.
“For most of the summer, we were on track to meet our housing goals,” said Alexander Coile, the director of residence life at CUC. “Then in early August, we had a flood of male students apply for housing. That’s when we made the decision to convert the guest housing to student housing.”
Come spring semester and the start of housing consolidation, the students in First Jonathan were left to their own devices to find where they would spend the remainder of the spring semester.
“We were able to decide where we would move to,” said the student from First Jonathan who was forced to move. “We could move into either Concordia Hall, Kohn-Lindy, or we could move to a different floor of DJ.”
It was not clear to the students who had to move whether their housing rate would change. The cost of living for a double in First Jonathan is $3,275, while the cost of living in Concordia Hall is $4,275.
“The first email told us we would have to pay the upcharge if we moved into Concordia Hall,” said the student. “We received a second email later that told us the pricing would stay the same.”
According to Coile, the decision to not have the students pay extra was a joint decision between the department of housing and the dean of students.
“We decided it was extraordinary circumstances,” said Coile. “We were moving them when they would have otherwise stayed put.”
Despite the school reversing course when it came to making the displaced students pay the upcharge, some students were upset by the fact that they were asked at all.
“The thought that we might have to pay more for something that wasn’t our fault shouldn’t have crossed their minds,” said one student. “It shouldn’t have been discussed.”
It wasn’t just the residents of First Jonathan who felt slighted. Some Concordia Hall residents were also upset to be receiving new roommates that they did not plan on having.
In particular, some Concordia Hall residents were upset by what they viewed as a lack of communication between themselves and the housing department.
“Getting new roommates wasn’t an idea that had been thrown around at all,” said Jonathan Scheer, a junior and resident of Third Concordia. “Then my roommate told me that we were getting two new roommates.”
To Scheer, the radio silence from Residence Life was what made everything difficult.
“Everything we heard, we heard from our incoming roommates,” said Scheer. “We had minimal communication from Residence Life, and the only time I heard anything from them was when I went and talked to them myself.”
Dennis Vanderplow, the Third Concordia resident assistant, said that he wasn’t informed that they would be receiving new residents on his floor. He said he found out when the new residents began to move their things into their new rooms.
Coile said that a lot of the information that needed to be passed onto the RAs would have come from the residence director of Concordia, Adam Gray. Gray recently departed CUC to take a job in Texas and could not be reached for comment.
Coile also said that while the goal is to notify everyone affected by housing consolidation, the school is not required to do so.
Students also found the timing of everything jarring, having to pack everything and move to another room a few weeks into the semester.
“Everything felt quick, and not very planned,” said one student. “They could have asked us to move in early from break, instead of having us start the semester and then be forced to move while we’re trying to adjust to a new semester.”
Coile said that the original goal was for everyone to be moved by Jan. 30, but the timeline ended up getting pushed back.
While all the First Jonathan students were able to find a place to live, the experience left the affected students feeling a little bit disenchanted with the school.
“At the end of the day, it’s just frustrating,” said Scheer. “It almost felt like we were just names on a spreadsheet; they move our names around, and the job is done.”
