A few weeks ago, as I was working on homework at Scovill during the late afternoon, I received a text message from my father that threw me a little off guard. The text message read “Why were you fined $20 by The Woods?”

At first I was very confused. I hadn’t done anything that went against the rules of The Woods, so I had no idea why I would be fined.

In order to find a reason as to why I was fined, I took it upon myself to search my Millikin email in order to see if a message from The Woods had been sent discussing why I received the fine. I did find a message from The Woods saying that if an apartment’s balcony is not clean that students would receive a fine. This angered me greatly.

When walking back to my apartment from Scovill, I investigated my balcony which was apparently so dirty that The Woods administration thought it was suitable to fine me. All I found on the ground of the balcony, which in fact had not been cleaned from during the summer before I had moved into my apartment, to find only a few sunflower seeds, which my roommate had dispensed outside, and a few cigarette butts that had been left by the previous inhabitants after they had moved out of the apartment.

The Woods has a lofty reputation of taking money away from its tenants for asinine reasons. One of the more ridiculous stories I’ve heard regarding The Woods taking money away from its inhabitants came from one of my good friends on campus.

Because of bad grades and an inability to go to class every day, my friend’s roommate had no choice but to leave the university, which left his room in The Woods completely empty- as the roommate had already signed a lease before leaving the school. Because of his roommate’s inability to contact The Woods to tell them that he would not be returning for his sophomore year, the room was left empty. During the middle of this current semester my friend received an email from The Woods, saying that, because another inhabitant wasn’t found to occupy the room that was left empty, my friend and his other roommates would be fined over $3,000, in order to compensate The Woods.

It’s ridiculous how my friend and his roommates had to pay for the doings of their roommate. Due to the lack of housing on Millikin’s campus, Millikin sophomores and juniors are practically forced to live in the apartments. Not to mention that rent is over $700 a month, much more expensive that local apartments and houses that can be rented. And now they are charging students extra fees just by the most asinine and ridiculous ways? This is in no way fair to the students who spend literally thousands of dollars to live in the apartment complex.

The worst thing is that The Woods claims to treat their students like adults by having them live in a sort of mock-up example of an apartment complex, if Millikin wanted students to know what it’s actually like to live in their own apartment, they would allow their students to be able to live in off campus housing instead of The Woods.