In September 2019, I began having trouble sleeping at night due to noise on my floor. I could hear my neighbors’ music, shouting and even moaning all night. I contacted my Resident Assistant (RA), who listened to my complaints but offered few solutions. Later that month, my roommate and I went to our Resident Director (RD) about the noise, who told us “college dorms are like this” and we should “deal with it.” I asked her to move us into a room on a designated quiet floor. She said, “there’s no such thing,” although Hofstra’s residential handbook The Living Factor states otherwise. 

The Living Factor also says “courtesy hours are in effect [24/7] … If a student is disturbing another resident because of noise and is asked to quiet down, this request should be honored, regardless of the time of day … [V]iolators may be asked to leave the residence hall.”

Nonetheless, the nightly noise continued, so much so that I couldn’t sleep and my mental health deteriorated. I tried to accommodate the noise with earplugs, headphones and white noise to no avail.

I went back to my RD on the Tuesday before Thanksgiving and explained how my neighbors responded with hostility when I asked them to lower their volume. After dismissing me in September, she now asked, “Why am I just now hearing about this?” She then offered to move our room, but we would have to do so that very night. I couldn’t do that because I had to travel that evening. The RD shrugged. “What do you want me to do about it?” 

Flash forward to Wednesday, Dec. 4. After yelling and music endured past 2:30 a.m., I asked my neighbors to quiet down. When the screaming continued, I wrote to my RA and RD again. They didn’t respond.

The next day, as I walked into the elevator with my friend, the girls followed us. They cornered us, berating us, holding the doors open so we couldn’t leave. I recorded the incident on my phone. Even that did not seem to warrant further action from Residence Life. They said it would have to go to the Office of Community Standards or Public Safety for investigation before disciplinary action could occur, neither of which ended up happening.

I felt unsafe in my dorm after that. Residence Life offered me an emergency dorm until my roommate and I could move elsewhere, but took no further action to keep me safe.

My story isn’t unique. It is symptomatic of an incompetent bureaucratic system which cannot effectively resolve conflict. Whether it’s an unhygienic roommate, a thieving suitemate or a noisy floor, Residence Life’s enforcement of its own rules is piecemeal at best. Instead of addressing the needs of residents as their name suggests, Residence Life redirects affected students to a wormhole of other departments.

Why is Residence Life not enforcing its own policies? For the amount of money I pay to live here and all the regulations that I have to comply with, I should have the privilege of being able to sleep soundly at night. That is a bare minimum request. 

Residence Life employees have asked me why I can’t just ask my neighbors to be quiet. Evidently, I have; this is where Residence Life is supposed to step in. I’m not a trained mediator. I have no real authority. My tuition pays Residence Life and Public Safety to do a job, which is to keep me safe and provide me with a livable dorm. Residence Life’s passivity escalates conflict between neighbors. I want Residence Life to be held accountable, to take students’ complaints seriously and to enforce their own policies so that everybody at Hofstra can come home to a safe, comfortable living space.

Marjorie Rogers is a junior journalism major