So where are you going to live next year? If you're a freshman or sophomore, chances are that question infuriates you. Understandable. If I had to live for two years in Mims, I'd slit my wrists with my housing ballot. Juniors are living Vandy/Barnard. Sophomores are being shoved into Towers singles. I'd rather funnel paint thinner than suffer a year in Tolman.

Now that the grim reality of housing is starting to hit home, everyone's up in arms. The kiddies are furious, the kiddies tell daddy and by now I'm sure Mark Bandas' office has fielded more phone calls from angry parents than Planned Parenthood. But is anything being done to assuage the situation?

Of course something is, don't you read The Hustler? Vanderbilt has funded a $1.3 million renovation of Kissam Quad! New carpet! New 48-inch plasma TVs in the common rooms! Kitchens with working appliances! With so many new and wonderful improvements, why doesn't everyone want to live there?

Dumping $1.3 million to renovate Kissam is like putting up wallpaper in a gulag and calling it a vacation resort. No matter what you do to that place, the fact that it looks like cell block 6 with slightly less sodomy will still remain. They should have just razed the entire quad to the ground and allowed off-campus permission, but what do I know?

The current housing options for upperclassmen are awful. So how do we fight back? I know! Let’s band together as a student body and, through our representation in student government, express our displeasure to the university in the form of a petition requesting something like, oh I don't know, off-campus housing. Then, after Vanderbilt giggles and casually ignores us as always, we can walk back to our holding cells and weep softly into our pillows as we listen to our overweight next-door neighbor having sex. Shoot me.

There's also the civil disobedience route. You could not go to class for the rest of the semester in protest and see where that gets you. You could wear a funny outfit and stand on the wall, yelling at annoyed passersby. Or if you really wanted to stick it to Housing with a 12-inch railroad spike, you could just not sign up for housing, refuse to live in the bathroom stall they give you for a room, and just live off campus anyway. It's a good thing there's nowhere near enough unity on campus to pull off a housing strike of some sort, or else we'd all be living at 20th and Grand with granite counter-tops and a walk-in closet. Sounds awful, right?

I understand the university's intense desire to make money and continue inching its way up the U.S. News and World Report ranking. Conveniently, it turns out that an effective way to do both is cloister students on campus, creating a great cover story AND millions in revenue for the school. Well played. Unfortunately this policy comes at the expense of quality of life for the students Vanderbilt loves so dearly. A small price to pay for the future of the university.

Honestly, the best part about this whole situation is that I'm leaving and don't have to deal with it. I really do feel sorry for people who have to spend the best years of their college life in condemned asylums, but that looks like the way it's going to be. If you don't want this to ever happen again, band together and let Vanderbilt know that its most valuable asset isn't the students it could be attracting, but the students it has right now.