By Paul Patras, Newswire Intern
After a day of classes and enjoying time with friends, it inevitably comes time to study. Whether you’re in STEM, business or the humanities, there will come a time when you just need to sacrifice a few hours to be locked into your books. Studying is an important part of college life. It’s part of the daily cycle for many students who are serious about their academics.
Fortunately, Xavier offers a multitude of buildings and classrooms that you can study in, like the various floors of the Conaton Learning Commons, Alter Hall and Smith Hall. Unfortunately, good luck getting into those buildings past 9 p.m. All of those buildings lock or close at a certain point, making it impossible to get in to study.
This is a big problem for many students — myself included — as having a separation between schoolwork and life is essential. I refuse to study or do homework in my dorm room — I do not want to work where I sleep. Having a work-life separation gives me a chance to escape from the academic grind.
Paul Patras suggests that academic buildings need to extend their hours for students, especially when study spaces are hard to come by.
Other students may simply not be able to study in their dorm room because they have loud roommates — or they may not want to bother them — and the common spaces in their dorm building just aren’t enough. Again, I feel this crosses the line of separation from school and life.
From what I have heard, these buildings began closing relatively early sometime during the COVID-19 pandemic, but they never went back to their old hours. Even buildings like the library close at 5 p.m. on the weekends. What’s even worse is that not all of the buildings close at the same time. For instance, if the library closes at 11 p.m. on a weeknight and you have to leave, you can’t go anywhere else because all of the other buildings are already closed.
At first, I thought this might be for security purposes, making sure that non-Xavier students can’t just wander onto campus during the night and enter a building. That would make sense. What doesn’t make sense is that even though all of these buildings have scanners for One Passes, the scanners do not unlock the door past the closing times.
From the insight of other students, I’ve heard that they think it’s inconvenient that students cannot access the building when they want to study late in the evenings. Often, they want to go study in one of the buildings, but they need to ask somebody to open the door who is already inside because our key cards don’t work and the doors are locked at very early times.
I think the best way to fix this issue is to have a building that doesn’t require workers to make entering accessible. It should be open 24 hours, but require the key cards past a certain time.