LAIE—On August 11th Christian Karnawan and 41 other male students living in Hale 2 were invited to come to the Hale lobby for a special meeting with the building’s RAs and a few officials from the BYU-Hawaii Housing department. Hale 2, they were told, was being converted to an all-female dorm. They had one week to pack up their belongings and move somewhere else.
Karnawan—who normally goes by his nickname, Tian—had lived in Hale 2 for over a year. This was his last semester at the school and he looked forward to moving out of the Hale and away from the university right after the block ended. For him, the announcement that he must move twice this month was an unwelcome surprise. “I had no idea that they had these plans. The weekend they want us to move is the same weekend I take my GREs. The week after that is finals. How am I supposed to find the time to study and move? The whole situation was hard to believe.”
Over the next week the housing office considered multiple solutions to the problem. Proposals were floated that ranged from turning parts of the Old Gym into a “barracks-style” shelter that could temporarily house new students, to requesting that faculty take new students into their homes. The department ultimately decided that the least painful option was to convert Hale 2 to an all-female dorm. “Had we not done this,” Rogers noted in an interview with The Student Voice, “we would have had to ask these new freshman to try and find housing off campus right when they got here.”
Rumors about the fate of Hale 2 began to fly around campus as more student workers in Admissions and Housing became aware of the number of female freshman admitted to the university. The Housing department decided that the best way to inform the tenants of the department’s plan was to hold a meeting where students’ concerns could be resolved in person. The date set for the meeting was August 6th—the same day that Hurricane Iselle made landfall in Hawai’i.
Preparing for Hurricane Iselle and Julio was the first priority for Housing staff, and the planned meeting with Hale 2 residents was postponed to the next week. The only thing students knew was the gossip spread by word of mouth. A former resident of the Hale remembered: “We all heard rumors, people talking, but we hoped they were not true.” Most students who did believe that the Hale was being converted to an all-female dorm thought that they would not be asked to move until after the semester was over. Rogers explained why Housing required male students to leave before then: “We are taking them out [early] to get ready for the females—rooms and bathrooms used by men for so long have to be cleaned before we let girls in.”
The seven days Housing gave students to leave the Hale was eventually extended to two weeks. The last male tenants left the Hale on August 23rd. Because of the decision to convert Hale 2 into an all-female dorm, the 42 male students students who lived there during Summer B and the 20 more who signed up to move in Fall Semester were forced to find alternative housing. Pressure on off-campus male housing—stretched to the limit to begin with—has increased to the point that many students have had to accept non-official housing. The decision has also impacted the student wards on campus; the Laie 1st YSA Stake has had to redraw ward boundaries to balance the two wards who lost of all their brethren in the move.
Ed Rogers asks students who have been affected by this change to remember the bigger picture. “Every decision we make must be made for the benefit of all of the students here,” he said. “This was not an easy decision to make. It was made after prayer and careful consideration. Most importantly, it was made for the student’s sake.”
Many students, however, are less frustrated with the decision to turn Hale 2 into an all-female dorm than they are with the way this decision was communicated to them.
“I understand why housing had to do this,” said one former Hale 2 resident who wishes to remain anonymous, “but I wish they had sent an e-mail or something to give us more warning. It reflects a lack of preparation and especially communication on their part.”
Tian agrees. After sending two e-mails and visiting the Housing office three times, he still could not find anyone available to answer his questions or address his concerns with Housing’s requirements. “This is the most annoying thing,” he said. “They should have let us know earlier. And after they let us know I could not talk to them about it.” Ben McRae, a student who tried to petition the housing office for the sake of friends forced to move, echoed these sentiments. “That is it. When we have these sort of problems, who do we go to?”
*Photo credit- http://catalog.byuh.edu/node/90
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