Juana Garcia/The Cougar
From hazardous walking spaces to consistently cold showers in the residence halls, it is safe to say that the UH campus has a problem with infrastructure. With the cost of tuition rising, UH needs to look towards a more proactive rather than reactive approach and make lots of necessary upgrades.
No campus is perfect, and that is a fact. With that in mind, there should always be efforts made to continuously improve the overall experience of students who pay thousands per semester to attend. On any given day, it seems as though students can point out a plethora of small but inconvenient issues that have relatively simple solutions.
“I was going for a nightly run through campus when I tripped on some uneven ground and scraped my leg pretty badly,” said biology freshman Gabe Brown. “It did not help that many areas around campus are not very well lit, which could be very dangerous for several reasons.”
Aside from the uneven ground, another problem stems from the drainage system – or lack thereof – in certain areas. After a rainstorm, quite a few prominent puddles of water sit there with nowhere to drain.
These puddles can be a vast breeding ground for mosquitoes and bacteria that could make students ill. Implementing better drainage systems would prevent these problems and increase the campus’s overall aesthetic appeal.
Another recurring issue seems to be plumbing. In Cougar Village I, the water in the showers has been lukewarm to cold, even when one turns the faucet all the way.
“The water issue in CV1 is beginning to be too much,” said hotel and restaurant management freshman Madisyn Foster. “I’m not paying that little money to live here for the water to not even get semi-warm. I just wish that they would stop shutting the water off and actually do something about it.”
As of the 2021-2022 academic year, students spend $3,390 per semester to live here. Therefore, they should be getting their money’s worth with a decent shower. Although UH routinely conducts hot water tests, the problem remains to resolve, an obvious indication that the pipes are not just in need of repair – they require significant renovations.
“While UH does a nice job keeping up with areas like the Campus Recreation and Wellness Center and Student Centers, some other buildings fall behind,” said strategic communications freshman Nicholas Powell. “Cougar Village II has had one of its elevators broken for nearly a month, and the other was out for about a week. These problems should be resolved in a reasonable amount of time.”
These individual problems highlight the widespread issue that the campus seems to have, which is the slow response to fixing infrastructure issues. Additionally, when the issues are fixed, they are more temporary Band-Aids as the issue is sure to repeat itself in a couple of weeks like the CV1 elevators.
These grievances are by no means the fault of the Fix-It department, as it is ultimately up to the administration to make investments into these changes. UH is a high-quality institution with exemplary academics and its infrastructure should match.
Michael King is a history freshman who can be reached at [email protected]
