Missing: Bathroom Stall Doors

By Isaiah Joseph | Published by December 5, 2021

Have you ever walked around campus and wondered why some things look so…odd? How about going to class and meeting that flickering light you have been seeing since the semester started or the stalls for people who have physical disabilities being out of order.

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Picture this, a long day sitting through those lectures that feel like an eternity, you reach for your beverage from time to time to quench your thirst as each sip springs life to your body. After a few minutes, it hits you.

“Woah I shouldn’t have drunk all that water, I got to go to the bathroom now!”

Whatever you want to call it — bathroom, restroom, lavatory, the latrine, that place — that haven is seen as a gateway to release one’s stress and flush it all away.

But let’s continue, you are walking swiftly to the bathroom doing your little dance to prevent yourself from releasing the floodgates on yourself. As you open the men’s room you walk in and rush to a toilet but then it hits you “Where the hell are the stall doors?” So much for privacy, right?

That being said, what is the deal with Kean University’s maintenance issues on the main campus? I assumed that Kean is very up to date with maintenance, but every time it feels like there is always something new to discover about how they aren’t properly taking care of the school.

One that hit me as you all have read in the previous paragraphs is the bathrooms. How would you feel using the bathroom with no stall doors? Students may be in a hurry to use the toilet and not have the slightest clue that the door isn’t there. Kean must be trying to make students feel more social knowing that it’s been months since we’ve been back on campus. 

They might as well remove the barriers between the urinals while they are at it. But I know as students here, we have all witnessed faulty maintenance issues around campus. Classrooms with flickering lights, the ceilings on the fourth floor of the Center for Academic Success (CAS) building leaking water and developing mold right after, or even the stairs looking like they haven’t been cleaned since the medieval ages.

I understand that maintenance workers on-campus work hard to keep the school in tip-top shape, but it feels like the small issues aren’t being addressed as much. A flickering light could be fixed faster than we know it. As I was searching for issues similar to ours. 

What surprised me is that this is very common among schools. I saw a Reddit post about how one student talks about their school removing bathroom stall doors because people kept writing on them. As a former high school student writing on the bathroom stalls is no more than tradition and a piece of history. Why are you removing history?

Hopefully, in the future, we see improvements being made within the main campus. Students and faculty should notify whoever is in charge of how our school is maintained that there are issues that need to be given attention and action needs to be taken because it’s the little things that matter a lot. Like the right to flush it all away in private.

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