Personal Statement: Baits won

Having no knowledge of the University’s campus when I opened my housing packet to find Baits I on my contract, I turned to the Internet for information.

“Baits is an amazing community that allows you to get involved and build lasting friendships during your first year at Michigan” reads a description on the housing website.

Whoever wrote that could have drafted speeches for Donald Rumsfeld during the run up to the Iraq War. I don’t know who Vera Baits was or what atrocity she committed, but it must have been terrible for the University to punish her as they have, naming their most disgraceful installation in her memory.

Let’s be clear. Baits is no community. It’s pure freshman hell. The one dorm that, upon telling someone you live there, unfailingly engenders an apology and a compassionate hand on your shoulder. My time in that heinous northern hovel wasn’t a housing assignment at all. It was a non-commutable eight-month prison sentence with limited visitation rights to Central Campus.

For most students, their freshman hallway is an easy and reliable source of companionship. Many end up living with friends they meet on their floor and keep those relationships throughout their college years. The set up of Baits completely robs its residents of that possibility. My hallway, scenically located in a half-lit basement, featured all of four doors. And I was the only freshman — stuck between a minority peer advisor and a fifth-year senior who had been living in that same Baits room for all five years. I assume he was a masochist.

I tried to look on the bright side. After all, I had a big room and I shared a bathroom with only one person. But that room had paper-thin walls and the woman next door liked to play her god-awful Ne-Yo albums into the early hours of the morning while she loudly argued with her friends about inane details of her sexual preferences. Try falling asleep to that.

Then there was the mail situation. On several occasions, I went to get my mail only to find that packages and letters had been ripped open and valuables stolen. Once could have been an accident. Five plus times is out-and-out theft. When confronted, the hall director said he had “never heard anything like this.” So I went to DPS. Well, not surprisingly, they turned up no suspects and my parents were no longer able to send me mail.

Weekends are an especially strange time for North Campus. That’s when the University inexplicably halts most bus service to Central. You can wait for an hour and still not catch one. Coupled with that is the fact that Baits doesn’t have a dining hall and the North Star, their retail food shop, closes on weekends. You can’t buy food, and can’t get on a bus to go get food. Insult to injury is an understatement.

So, unable to get mail, a meal, sleep, a sanitary bathroom, or people to talk to, I figured things were at their worst. That is, until my neighbor started her witch hunt. For some reason, starting second semester, she started banging on my door and asking me if I was smoking in my room. I never was and never did, making this a very confusing and unwelcome interruption.

This peaked when I heard a loud knock at my door one night, followed by a booming “OPEN UP, DPS!” The officer said they had “received a complaint about marijuana smoking.” He proceeded to enter my room and began searching for contraband, opening drawers and moving things around. Minutes later, he confirmed that there was nothing to be found, and went next door to inform my neighbor who called in the complaint. Considering everything else wrong with Baits, random police searches were a little more than I could handle.

—William Petrich is an LSA sophomore

It may sound like I’m just airing out a string of complaints to illustrate how much I despise the Baits experience. Well, I am. And why shouldn’t I? Living in that slum was, without rival, the worst eight months of my life. In the battle for my sanity, Baits won. I was miserable on a daily basis and there was nothing I could do to change that because of where I lived and how that place operated.

It’s sadistic for a well-endowed university to subject students to that kind of torture, especially while it spends hundreds of millions of dollars to build a new state of the art North Quad and Hill Dining Center. The University ought to tear down those shacks and erase that ugly blight on their otherwise impressive campus. An administration so concerned with equality of opportunity should stop institutionally disadvantaging a thousand students every year by sticking them in those hellholes. My heart goes out to everyone forced to live there now. I just hope that soon, no one has to.