The War on Cars

Cait Leist/The Mirror

Students at the townhouses returned this year to find that all the parallel parking spots had been painted over and that they had to fight for a decent parking pass or risk having to stick their car by Jogues.

Down by the Village, students discovered that the once packed parking lot across from the Quick Center was now off limits to student parking and reduced to an empty ghost town of tarmac. Worse off was this year’s class of sophomores; the administration stripped them of a means to escape, for a few hours, from the entrapping habitual bubble that is campus.

All these strange actions, done in spite of fervent objections by student leaders and little, if any, consultation as to the needs and desires of the students themselves, shed light on what appears to be a new goal for Fairfield’s administration: waging a war on cars with the goal of dramatically shrinking the number of vehicles on campus.

The administration and its student apostles crank out a series of buzzwords if asked why they are making the lives of students who want to get off-campus for a few hours a living hell. The war on cars is because of the need for “sustainability,” an attempt to “go green,” or about half a dozen other catchphrases that fit into some new Jesuit-value flavor of the month. That all may look great on a shiny promotional pamphlet (printed in soy ink on fair-trade recycled paper, of course) to give to the Board of Trustees, but it ignores the facts about Fairfield’s location and the needs and desires of the students who ultimately pay the University’s bills.

Fairfield exists in an area that is suburban with rural tendencies. Mass transit by bus (the Greater Bridgeport Transit Authority) is a joke, and the Metro North train doesn’t do much more than shovel people back and forth from my hometown in New York. For students who, in light of the withering job market, want to bolster their resume with an internship, a car is practically essential. It is ironic that Fairfield University, which has invested so much into making the Dolan School of Business the prestigious institution that it is, is directly undermining the college’s business students; depriving them of the ability to gain the real-world experience they need.

Then there’s the issue of off-campus recreation. We live on a small campus with little more than 3,000 people, and each and every one of us need to take a few hours each week to leave this little bubble and chill out off-campus.

It’s unthinkable that many students will now be denied the ability to spend a Friday night at a club in New Haven, or drive down to the beach for an hour after a tough exam. Everyone who is an upperclassman knows how much more difficult freshman year was because of the lack of a car: no groceries, limited entertainment options and virtually no way to reasonably leave campus in a timely manner. Why is the administration hell-bent on extending this misery to span half of a student’s college years?

Faced with a difficult situation that they have no control over, members of FUSA have done a great job of trying to ease the transportation woes as best as they can. The FUSA Senate worked to improve the University shuttle into the town (it now takes about an hour to buy a quart of milk at the grocery store instead of the head-banging two) and succeeded in bringing the Hertz rental cars to campus.

But their actions do little to make up for what the administration has done to the student body: launching an attack on a basic and simple means of mobility at the expense of the student body. Students need to raise their voices loud and clear. The war on cars is one that we will not let the administration win.

Editor’s Note: Jonas Stankovich is a Senator for the class of 2010.