The administration has instituted a new $25 fee for guests at Halloween. In their ongoing effort to vanquish the celebration, the OU administration has decided that to sleep on residence hall floors, all guests must pay this fee. The decision came without warning and without open debate.
In this unexpected announcement, Kent Smith, vice president of Student Affairs, tried to couch the new fee in practical and friendly terms, saying that 15 percent of the total would benefit student programming. What was lost amid the jokes about hotels and the self-congratulation was talk about implementation. How is this money going to be collected? Who is going to be doing the collecting? And when is it going to be collected? Are guests going to be required to send in a check to OU to be admitted to the residence halls? Or are the students going to have to pony up the fee so their friends can stay?
Forcing guests to pay for their stay is a staggering idea considering that Halloween 2006 was fairly calm. There were 99 arrests ' 23 being OU students ' but that's down from the 128 arrests in 2005. Even the Athens Police Department acknowledged that the crowd on Court Street was the smallest in years
which leads to all sorts of questions: Why now? Why so high?
The university has a right to find a way to cut costs, and it is not out of the realm of possibility to charge guests to stay in the halls. But we wonder why the fee is as high as $25. In talking about the change, Smith said that OU spent $91,443 on Halloween this fall, including $38,686 in overtime pay for additional security.
But he estimated the total cost was actually somewhere between $150,000 and $170,000. Had the fee been in place last year, the university could have generated roughly $60,000 from the more than 2,400 visitors, though that does not account for the 15 percent earmarked for programming. That's a big financial shortfall, and as fewer guests flood Athens, fewer dollars will come in. Then again, that might just be the point.
Let's be honest for once. This is not about defraying costs for the university, nor is it, as Smith suggests, a way to be fiscally responsible. It is a way to subvert an Ohio University tradition. Halloween does not have a high alumni turnout, unlike Homecoming (which the University has had equal problems with).
We understand that Halloween costs the university money, and we can agree to a fee for guests in the dorm. But $25 from the start is a ridiculous imposition.
If the university wants to do away with Halloween, it should at least tell the students that that is the goal, instead of hiding it with funding figures.
Editorials represent the majority opinion of the executive editors. Send your submissions to posteditorial@ohiou.edu. 17
Archives
Unexpected fee for Halloween guests reveals the administrationG
