The Daily Nebraskan is disappointed with University Housing at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.
As local and national news sources including the Daily Nebraskan, the Lincoln Journal Star, the Omaha World-Herald and even the Associated Press, have reported throughout the past week, bedbugs have visited the UNL City Campus.
Beginning with two students' reports of the bugs in their Abel Hall dorm room, University Housing has gone on to confirm three incidents this academic year: one in the Abel dorm room, one in an Abel student lounge and one in a student room in the Village.
That information — the three specific locations of the bedbugs — comes courtesy of a Jan. 20 email sent from Sue Gildersleeve, director of University Housing, to all students living in university residence halls. This marked the first time Housing addressed a large cross-section of the student body regarding the situation, providing updates and tips for dealing with the bugs should they appear elsewhere.
The information the email provides is useful; the fact that it came two weeks late is not.
This provides the Daily Nebraskan's first concern with the way University Housing has handled the bedbug situation: the lack of timely communication with residence hall students. Announcements from Housing seem to coincide with coverage in local media, rather than developments in the situation.
Information about the bedbugs was first published, along with the first official acknowledgement from Housing, one week earlier in the Jan. 13 issue of the Daily Nebraskan. This marked the first time anyone outside of those directly involved with the incident was made aware of the bugs. By that time, the two residents of the infested Abel Hall dorm room had already been battling the bugs for one week, since Jan. 6., just after returning from winter break. The bugs had already been exterminated by the time of the article. The bugs were discovered living in a cork board and had been in the room for quite a while, according to Facilities, Management & Planning investigators.
At the time of the article, Keith Zaborowski, associate director of Housing Residence Life, told the Daily Nebraskan that Housing had also confirmed one other outbreak this year, the aforementioned room in the Village. When the Village incident occurred hasn't been made clear, and no announcement was made prior to the discovery of the bugs in Abel Hall. That makes two incidents of bedbugs in separate locations this academic year with no announcement from Housing.
For the next five days, Housing remained silent on the bedbugs, until the Lincoln Journal Star published a Jan. 18 follow-up story with new statements from Zaborowski. Housing's first direct contact with a large group of students didn't come until an Abel floor meeting the next day, the same day as local news source Channel 10/11 parked outside the residence hall to broadcast a video story about the incident. Gildersleeve's email followed soon after.
The time between the first reports of the bugs, the first published information about the bugs and the first contact with the student body regarding the bedbugs is alarming. Gildersleeve specifies in a story on today's front page that Housing chose to wait because the bugs "are not contagious like a disease that we feel we have to warn people (about)." Yet their presence in four locations since June, when they were first discovered in a laboratory used as office space in the College of Engineering, speaks to a problem students should have been notified about. Friday's email also drives home the importance of reporting the bugs to prevent spread and cites "a significant increase in bed bug infestations in the U.S."
The Daily Nebraskan finds this failure to communicate the incident to the students irresponsible and hopes for a greater fluidity of information in the future.
The second, and more alarming, issue the Daily Nebraskan takes with Housing's response is its treatment of the Abel students who first reported the bedbugs.
According to the previously cited Jan. 18 Lincoln Journal Star article, Zaborowski "said the students likely brought the bedbugs to the room."
"We're confident at the beginning of this year in this room there weren't bedbugs," he went on to tell the Lincoln Journal Star.
This contradicts information released both before and afterward, which indicates much less certainty regarding the origin of the bugs. It also shows a flagrant disregard for the reputation of the students in question, whose names had already been publicly revealed in the Jan. 13 Daily Nebraskan article.
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