In light of a fraternity at Bradley being uprooted due to pipe damage, students are also noticing facility issues in their own dorm buildings that call attention to wider concerns of issues and administrative responses regarding Bradley’s dorms.
Last year, the Delta Tau Delta fraternity was removed from their original house and placed into neighboring College Hall due to a pipe bursting in their kitchen, which caused sewage to leak into their walls.
The work order was placed back in August 2021, while former house manager and current senior Adrian Rutkowski was still living in the house. In an interview with Rutkowski from last year, he said that the pipe issue was present when he was a sophomore, leading to the possibility that the pipes could have been leaking for over a year.
While the solution of moving into College Hall seemed reasonable at the time, black mold was already living in the building when the fraternity arrived in their new, temporary home. Luckily, the mold was cleaned up from their bathroom before any of the members got sick from mold poisoning.
“It also makes you wonder if that [black mold] was going on in our house, what makes you think that it’s also not going on here [in College Hall]?” Trey Kozup, junior civil engineering major, and current vice president and house manager of the fraternity, said in an interview last year.
The fraternity members were displaced to College Hall for four weeks. Throughout this time, there was communication between the executive board of Delta Tau Delta and the Bradley Housing Department to try and fix the issues in both houses. After messages back and forth negotiating solutions, the fraternity was able to return to their home just in time for the fall rush of 2022.
“When there are issues like mold reported, custodial staff is sent to identify the problem and clean it up as soon as possible,” Ryan Bair, Executive Director of Residential Living and Student Conduct, said. “Then facilities and housing determine if more work needs to take place to address the issue, which may mean we take a room offline for deeper cleaning and/or monitoring.”
Other students around campus have recently experienced issues inside their dorms, such as ceilings falling down.
“My ceiling ended up with a hole that I could fit in,” freshman television arts major Charlie Maki said. “The ceiling stuff was crumbling and getting everywhere. I brought the issue up, but nothing was done for approximately four weeks.”
Maki’s room was not the only one that had issues with housing, as sophomore journalism major Hermes Falcon reported that the ceiling in their room also collapsed.
“Three days after finally settling in, I saw a crack in the popcorn ceiling — I didn’t think anything of it,” Falcon said. “…More and more pieces kept on falling; the dust that fell along with the chunks somehow clogged the audio system on my TV.
Falcon reported that maintenance finally fixed their ceiling on Sept. 14, six days after the report was sent in.
Many times, students have noticed that the management does not respond as quickly as possible which causes the issues to carry on. One instance of this occurred to Falcon, who said that a bat had managed to find its way into their dorm building and ended up in their room, where it spent two days before being removed.
Falcon brought to attention another fault in the layout of the building they are currently living in: the layout of the singles apartment building is inaccessible to those with physical disabilities.
“I couldn’t help but notice how Elmwood is very inaccessible to students in wheelchairs or students who use other mobility aids,” Falcon said. “There’s no elevator to take things up to your room if you’re on the second or third floor.”
Bradley students all over campus are struggling to figure out solutions to the issues reoccurring in their buildings including mold, ceiling flaking and inaccessibility. Looking forward, Falcon and other students hope for more attentiveness and action on Bradley’s end with regards to the multiple housing issues.
“No one would come [to attend to my work order] because I wasn’t labeled as high priority,” Falcon said.
This story may be updated to reflect additional reports that are awaiting confirmation.
