I know it’s been a while but I’m not disappointed, I’m flat out angry at the way Towson administration chose to handle the snow on February 9th. Commuting without owning a car can be a real challenge, and sometimes it just sucks. Commuting with a car in bad weather is just as bad. Commuting with a car and not being able to find a parking spot, even by SECU, after you paid over $300 for a parking permit is pretty bad too. There’s no real winners in the game of living off campus and getting to class. Towson’s off campus shuttle service is actually a great idea, and such a help for many students. I take the shuttle to and from campus every day that I have class, or a club meeting. I transferred here in the fall of 2015 and have not driven to campus myself once (I’ve gotten other rides maybe a handful of times). In fact, despite having my license and albeit very limited access to my family’s vehicles, I do not drive that much. Other people I know do not even have their license because they are scared to drive, or they don’t have a reliable person to teach them, or they simply do not have the money to do school and pay for a car, gas and insurance. The struggle can get pretty real when it comes to a college student’s budget and resources. So many people, like me, rely on Towson to run the shuttle in a…well, reliable way. We expect it to run, generally on time. We except to be told when it won’t be. We as Towson students pay tuition and fees – it’s not as though we are asking for services that we have not contributed money to.
Towson decided to suspend the off campus shuttle service…with a tweet. A tweet! Apparently the administration at Towson functions at the same exact level that freshmen do when they announce that they’re moving on to a different party. Oddly enough, even though Towson chose social media as its means of communication for this situation, no responses were given to concerned or angry students. We were flat out ignored.
Towson obviously understood that the conditions of the roads were not ideal. If the roads were completely fine, the shuttle service would not have been suspended “due to inclement weather.” So, we have to wonder if it was not safe for the shuttles to operate, why does Towson think it’s safe for us to drive to campus? And then, of course, if we even made it to campus in our cars, would there be parking? Without the roofs of the garages, even far away lots like 14 can fill up pretty quickly. A number of people missed classes the first day of the semester because it took them over an hour to find a spot, even by SECU.
Now, a number of us have missed classes today, because despite what Towson knew was inclement weather, they stayed open and expected professors and students to go to class even though Towson could not offer the services that many of us needed to meet those expectations. We can not “plan accordingly” if Towson does not even feel obliged to send an email or an emergency text with essential information.
But that’s ok, because they restored shuttle service within an hour and half… with another tweet. Somebody send the Towson adminstration to a communication studies course while us commuters figure out how to plan with no information. It really is something that us students are asked to be accountable for attendance even when the university appears to actively working against us though. Maybe it’s Towson’s turn to be accountable for proper planning and communication during bad weather instead of putting it all on us.