Morgan Markley
Senior Reporter
When students are applying to colleges they usually looks at what degrees are offered and where the school is located, but when applying, a student might not notice the differences in dorm rules and regulations.
Carle Hall on the Keene State College campus houses mostly freshman students. In Carle, there are resident assistants on every floor that watch over the students and make sure no rules are broken.
Nearby in Henniker, N.H., New England College has rules that are similar to KSC.
Graphic By: Jill Tague / Equinox Staff
Sophomore Heather DeSousa, an RA at NEC, said when a student is caught drinking in a dorm she calls Campus Safety and they take care of it from there. DeSousa also said that if a student is really intoxicated they will put that student in “protective custody” or, “If it’s severe then we have them taken to Concord Hospital.”
Alyssa Marginiak, a senior RA at Saint Anselm College, said that they have a wet campus and it depends on the age of student whether they get written up or not. She said, “Our freshmen residence halls are substance free. They automatically get written up whether or not they’re 21 for drinking in their apartment or in residence halls.”
Associate Director of Residential Life and Housing, Jim Carley said about the dorm rules at KSC, “There’s some things that the college looks at as much more serious violations and obviously those would be drug violations, alcohol violations, sexual assaults, physical assaults, those type of violations. And those are ones which tend to be situations that don’t follow a simple step-by-step level 1, level 2, level 3 thing.”
Marginiak said at St. Anselm, “If a person was in an apartment and they were 21 and had 21-year-olds that were drinking, it wouldn’t be an issue.”
At KSC, the dorms on campus are co-ed and DeSousa said that on the NEC campus the dorms are co-ed as well, but at St. Anselm College, the rules differ.
Marginiak said, “The dorms are all gender separated; all the guys are in one building and all the girls in the other. We do have one building…which the top floor is girls and the bottom floor is guys but in each of those floors you have to swipe in so it’s more secure in that building.”
Marginiak also said that in order to get a member of the opposite sex into a dorm, “When they [ the guest] got to the front door, they’d have to be buzzed in because obviously their card wouldn’t let them in the building, and they would drop their ID card off and say which room they were going to and who they were visiting…and then they could go to their room until the time that we call our parietal hours where they can no longer be in the residence hall of the opposite sex.”
At KSC, however, students have the flexibility to have any fellow KSC student in their room at anytime without gender being an issue.
Another aspect of dorm life on the KSC campus is the Owl Card. KSC students can use their card to swipe into their dorms. This system isn’t uncommon as NEC and St. Anselm both use cards for entrance into dorms.
Marginiak said, “In the traditional housing or regular halls they have an ID that they swipe to get in and then a room code, in the apartments it’s just a room code on the outside of the door.”
NEC’s dorms do differ from KSC’s because they don’t have desk attendants on duty at the dorms. DeSousa said, “We have two central locations. For the freshman side there’s one duty office and we have one duty office for the upperclassmen…and there’s an RA in there from 7 p.m. to midnight on weekdays and 7 p.m. to 2 a.m. on weekends and a 24-hour, on-call [RA].”
Marginiak said in the St. Anselm freshman and sophomore dorms there are desk attendants, “From 5 o’clock at night to 2 in the morning that [there are attendants that] check IDs and then at 11 [p.m.] during the week and one on the weekends.”
Carley said that he thinks KSC is, “More concerned about your health and safety than we are about anything else. I do think the college has a pretty open arms policy. If you’ve gone out and gotten help, if you need to come back, we want you to be successful you are proving that you can be successful you know we want you to stick around here. But if you can’t the issue is not if you should be a student here the issue is that you have a health issue.”
Carley said that KSC may experiences changes in dorm rules by July 1, “We’re doing a thorough review of the conduct system. Everything from the policies to the philosophy to procedures that we follow to engage and enforce the policies.”
The possibility of the new changes in KSC dorm rules and regulations would lead to even more difference or similarities amongst New Hampshire colleges.
Morgan Markley can be contacted
at mmarkley@keene-equinox.com