I was only technically “on-campus” for one year of my time at Longwood, then at Lancer Park and then off on my own, free of any real ties to campus unless I was attending class or doing my extracurriculars.
Being a “commuter” has never been something that I’ve labeled myself as, as many students who live on Buffalo Street or Virginia Street, or any of the other off-campus living areas can probably identify with. I don’t drive in from Charlottesville or Nottoway County, I don’t have to utilize the commuter lounge, I don’t have a commuter parking decal and I don’t need a meal plan or bonus dollars.
Over the past semester or so, I’ve had a couple of experiences that have made me a feel a little devalued as a Longwood student solely because I live off campus. The first came a couple months ago when I parked in the two-hour visitor parking spot in front of the library to run in and return a couple DVDs. As soon as I pulled into the spot, a police officer came up and asked me why I was parking there. I told him I was just running in to return a couple things. He asked if I was a student, I said yes and he said this visitor parking wasn’t for student use. I don’t have a decal and my license actually says Farmville on it — I am a citizen of Farmville, I am a part of this community. Therefore, this makes me, indeed, able to use the visitor parking spots because they, as the officer noted, are reserved for Farmville citizens to use at the library. Though all of my points were valid, I simply left and returned the DVDs the next day, so as
to avoid any more arguing. Now that I think of it, the only two experiences where I’ve felt
somewhat discriminated against because I live off campus were situations that took place in and around the library. The other occurred just a few weeks ago when I had a late fee to pay at the library (no, not for the DVDs I was trying to return when the cop scolded me). I went up to pay my five-dollar fee with a five-dollar bill of American currency and the woman behind the counter told me that they don’t accept cash.
“Uh... so what do you accept?”
She told me LancerCash. I haven’t been hip to the whole LancerCash thing, because I have a job and like most people who make their own money, I spend it in the form of cash, check or card. Therefore, I didn’t understand this strange middleman of LancerCash. Maybe it makes more sense to others, but really it’s just for parents to send you money to spend at the official “we take LancerCash” stores, right? But money does that, too. So you could just ask your dad to send you twenty bucks and call it a day. I’m sure it’s much more complicated than that but from an “outsider” looking in, it seems a little superfluous to me.
Don’t get me wrong; I was a student for two years with a meal plan and bonus dollars and the whole she-bang. I blew my parent’s money on Chick-fil-A twice a week just like everyone else did and I understand that stage of life at Longwood. But it seems like some of these Longwood policies are catering strictly to underclassmen or campus living students, when there’s a good chunk of off-campus, or “commuter”, students here, too — sharing the space with the “true” Longwood campus living students.
I relish my memories of dorm days and I miss D-hall sometimes (and by “sometimes” I mean really only on birthday dinner nights), but that doesn’t mean that that group of students is the sole face of Longwood. All I ask is that in coming years after I’m gone from this wonderful place, is that the higher-ups consider the wide range of students that they have attending this university before they make policies that seem to apply solely to on-campus students.
