On February 27th, instead of attending a deliberation in our own class, I attended another class’s deliberation on housing at Penn State. After hearing that this was their topic of discussion, I was very excited to hear their ideas, as I had gone through many issues in the fall trying to figure out my housing for next year so I feel like I could relate to this topic a lot. Their group’s three approaches focus on the expansion of on-campus housing, governmental funding and intervention for off-campus rent, and expanded access to transportation for those living far off-campus. I learned so much from their discussion and I’m glad I got the opportunity to participate!

 

The first approach their group discussed was focused on ways Penn State can directly help their housing crisis, such as moving housing contract deadlines back from the fall to the spring and building more on campus housing and apartments. As someone who had no idea how stressful the housing process can be here, I know it would have been helpful for me to have more time to decide on housing options. Moving the deadline back may also relieve some of the competition and scramble for students to find an apartment and sign a lease. Also, most of the apartments downtown are substantially more expensive than living in a dorm and even the on-campus nittany apartments or white course apartments. Currently, students either have to sacrifice having their own bathrooms and living space if they want to live in dorms for cheap, or will have to shell out a great deal of money to get an apartment downtown. Expanding the types of on campus housing options to include more suites and apartment-style living for a comparable price to the dorms may be the solution for many students. 

 

The second approach involves ways the state can get involved to aid this problem, such as giving more grants or loans to students to be able to afford housing and setting governmental limits on how much the rent can be raised for off-campus and downtown housing. While the moderators did a great job explaining this approach, I couldn’t help but feel like this approach wouldn’t tackle the underlying issue. There would likely not be enough money to go around to cover everyone’s rent money, so only a small percentage of students would actually benefit from this legislation, if it could ever get passed. The ide of rent-control for off campus housing sounds great in theory as well, but many of the apartments are already unreasonably priced for the amount of space you get, so I feel like this approach can only go so far. I personally was more drawn to the ways Penn State itself can help to combat this issue. I think that it would be difficult to get the government to step in in the first place as it doesn’t directly involve them, and I am unsure about how much they can actually do to help. 

 

The third approach focuses on transportation efforts, like expanding bus routes and more on- and off-campus parking lots. The idea behind this approach is that if more people can bring their cars or have more access to public transportation to and from their apartment, they will be able to sign leases for apartments farther off-campus, where there is more space and they are generally cheaper. I spoke up during the deliberation of this approach to add that there are already problems with overcrowded transportation routes right now, as my own deliberation group pointed out, so having more people come into campus through cars or buses would create or amplify a host of other problems. Additionally, not everyone wants to spend time commuting to classes every day or be removed from the liveliness of Penn State’s campus and downtown area. Overall, I found that this approach doesn’t consider the needs of students here, since many students either don’t own or aren’t able to bring their car here and rely on easy access to campus or the downtown area. 

 

After hearing all the approaches from this deliberation, I was definitely drawn to the first approach to solving this issue. I believe that this approach is most likely to get to the root of the problem and would be beneficial to the most students. Knowing how much I struggled in the fall with finding housing, I really do hope that these issues get fixed and this deliberation was helpful in aiding that process!

I attended Timothy Snyder’s Conversation on Freedom and Democracy at the State Theater in September. One thing that I was pleasantly surprised by Timothy Snyder’s presentation was that even though it was a conversation about the ‘Dilemmas of Democracy’, he made it clear from the beginning that he personally believes that democracy is not doomed, and it is, in fact, our only chance at defending our future. I personally resonated with this statement because although the state of politics is not looking very bright right now, focusing on only the negatives without considering the solutions to those problems will not help. I appreciated how Timothy Snyder’s presentation was not all about how our future is doomed and he actually provided solutions to the problems we are facing today.

 

One part of Snyder’s conversation that I found particularly interesting was the discussion on ideas of “negative freedom” and “positive freedom” and the distinction between the two. He explained that the idea of negative freedom is that freedom is a matter of the government staying out of one’s business and not putting up barriers to one’s liberties. Positive freedom, however, is the idea that everyone should have freedom and the government exists to facilitate this. He explains that negative freedom is often a defense for people who already have the power to use against a government trying to disperse some of that power to others with less influence. Negative freedom, he believes, doesn’t serve inequality and aims to keep those with power and influence in control while leaving minority groups in the dust. I thought this was a really interesting way of looking at things and really resonated with his ideas on this topic. 

 

Another idea that Snyder brought up was the act of prison gerrymandering. This is when districts are gerrymandered to include large prisons, which adds to the population of the area, even though these prisoners can’t vote. By having large prisons in a district, it gives more representation and power to the area, a large part of the population is disenfranchised and doesn’t have a say in government. It’s also a reason why many politicians vote for more prisons in their area. Snyder connected this idea to the ⅗ rule from America’s history and how African American slaves were allowed to be partly counted as part of the population to give the south more representation, yet the slaves were not allowed to vote or participate in government in any way. I didn’t know much about this topic beforehand but I thought this whole part of the conversation was really interesting. 

 

Overall, I learned a lot from Timothy Snyder’s Conversation and I’m glad I went. It gave me a whole new perspective on the future of democracy and the ways we can possibly fix things. I really enjoyed the connections Snyder made to current issues in politics, such as the Ukraine War. It really proved to me that this discussion is more relevant now than ever and it inspired me to follow politics more closely after this presentation.