Greta Lane
Staff Writer
After a week and a half of constant freezing temperatures, everyone on campus is excited for the snow and ice to melt and for operations to (finally) resume as usual. Even though things are rapidly returning to normal, many students are still unhappy with how the administration handled the adverse weather conditions.
First and foremost: the ice was a huge obstacle. After a couple of days, most of the snow on the sidewalks, driveways, and side roads quickly turned into ice with a night of ice and rain. It caused embarrassing falls and longer walks, but it also caused major issues like sliding cars. Most students took grievance with the lack of shoveled sidewalks and salted roads. Some roads and driveways were even closed off completely to prevent driving, which resulted in some people being completely unable to use their cars if they wanted to. Students reported that multiple cars got snowed in on Hodgson Hill and a delivery driver got stuck in the Johnson driveway. Despite multiple contacts to the Sewanee Police Department, the cars remained snowed in for multiple days, as the Police Department told drivers that moving the cars was a “liability.” SPD officers told a student whose truck got stuck, “it’s out of our control.”
The dangers posed by the icy conditions are a main reason that classes were held online via Zoom. As everyone is well aware, Zoom classes are less-than ideal. Zooms are perpetually awkward, it is very easy for students to get distracted, there is little connection between students and teachers, and, of course, the ever-persistent Wi-Fi issues. Doing Zooms can (and did) bring up those negative feelings for professors and students alike rooting from the pandemic. Other colleges in the area, UTC for example, just completely canceled the first few days of classes. This would have been a better option for Sewanee because students and professors would have been able to enjoy their snow days and wouldn’t have had to stay inside most of the day to do Zoom classes.
Being inside most of the day is not preferable for many. This quickly became a problem for many students because their dorms were extremely cold. Multiple dorm buildings, specifically the older ones, suffered from exaggerated coldness throughout the rooms and common spaces because of the heating systems not being able to function as well under the stresses of extreme cold. Students had to resort to putting blankets over windows, shoving towels in the cracks of doors, wearing multiple layers of clothing even when inside, and eventually, when it got too unbearable, Res Life had to give portable heaters to certain students. Needless to say, these were not the most enjoyable or habitable conditions.
Between the ice, cold dorms, janitorial workers not being able to come to clean the residence halls, and the Zooms, the first week of this semester was a sub-par beginning to the Easter Semester. I understand that the weather conditions are fully out of the administration’s control, but there are several things that they could have done to make the experience less unpleasant for the students.