WSU Tiptoes Out Of Dark Ages Skips Vote On Overnight Guests With Unusual Compromise

Washington State University appears to have finally resolved one of its thorniest issues: whether students should be allowed to have overnight guests in residence halls.

It took nearly two years of discussions, always behind closed doors.

Unlike most colleges and university’s across the nation, WSU continues to ban visitors in dorms in the wee hours of the morning.

Students and a university task force endorse changing the state administrative code barring overnight visitors - the only one of its kind at the state’s public universities. But such rules are usually changed by the Board of Regents, and any public action at that level threatens to set telephones ringing with parents and alumni concerned about the prospect of school-sanctioned student sex.

Now, Gus Kravas, vice provost for student affairs, has managed to avoid recasting the no-visitors rule by reinterpreting it instead. “Visitors” will still have to leave dorms between 2 and 6:30 a.m. “Guests” however, will be free to stay in certain halls if they register with hall staff.

The rule, said Kravas, “is like the American Constitution in some regards - you have to interpret to some degree. I know that I’m interpreting it broadly so it can be something that can apply in the 1990s, if you will.”

About 4,000 of the university’s 16,000 students live in university housing.

The change will also help school officials keep better tabs on who is staying in their 20 residence halls, he said. As it is now, the rule barring overnight guests is essentially ignored.

“I personally believe that this is going to create a safer environment in our resident halls by making certain that we control who’s in there,” Kravas said.

The new definitions are “kind of a joke,” said Jennifer Atkinson, who wrestled with the issue last year as president of the Residence Hall Association. “The students will be rolling their eyes at the semantics - ‘Are you a guest or are you a visitor?”’

The handling of the change also speaks to WSU’s skittishness toward dealing with potentially controversial matters in public, said Atkinson.

“Everything we can do is hush-hush, as quiet as possible, under the carpet,” she said.

Public reaction would seem to encourage some wariness. When the issue surfaced in 1994, Kravas received about two dozen pieces of mail against the change.

While the issue is “not a big deal” among legislators, said Larry Ganders, the university’s Olympia lobbyist, “it’s viewed as a volatile issue” by administrators. “It’s seen as one that could get politically out of hand,” he said.

People could come to view the school as a “wide-open promiscuous university,” or, if the current rule is enforced vigorously, “living in the Dark Ages,” he said.

Atkinson said Kravas asked her at one point not to talk about the rule with a reporter for The Spokesman-Review. John Robinson, her predecessor, said Kravas gave him a similar directive a year earlier.

Kravas denied ever doing so.

“I don’t gag any students,” he said. “My feeling is any student that wants to express himself to the press or anyone else is free to do so.”

The regents have never discussed the overnight rule publicly. But last summer the board somehow reached a consensus against a rule change, prompting Kravas not to forward to the regents a task force recommendation to revise it.

In a private meeting of several regents and student leaders last fall, it became clear that the key holdout among the regents was R.M. “Mac” Crow. And unless it could have a unanimous vote on a rule change, the board would not touch it, said Atkinson.

Crow’s term has since expired. But administrators and regents concluded they could avoid changing the administrative code and simply use different definitions of guest and visitor, Atkinson said.

“They realized they didn’t need to change the rule,” she said. “But they wanted it to be as quiet as possible. It’s so political.”

, DataTimes