Recently the Pomona College administration decided to change their policy on individual students painting their rooms. Before this semester the policy had been that a student could paint his or her room any color as long as the room was restored to its original condition by the time the student moved out of it.

Now, if a student is found to have painted his or herr room, he or she will be automatically charged a hundred dollars for every painted wall.

This new policy is problematic on several levels. First and most obviously, it limits student self-expression. Pomona is a liberal arts college and should be interested in encouraging its students to express themselves creatively. It does this through one of its PAC requirements and by providing several outlets for students to express themselves on campus, such as Walker Wall.

Yet this new dorm room policy limits student self-expression in the one environment that is most conducive to self-expression: the student’s own living space. Modifying one’s immediate surroundings so as to make an individual mark on them is a basic human instinct. Painting a room is the simplest and most definitive way of making that space unique, making it your room and not just another dorm room identical to every other on campus. This type of self-expression could be especially comforting to students living away from home for the first time overwhelmed by the anonymity of institutional living. Such self-expression can’t be comforting, though, when it carries a penalty of four hundred dollars.

Aside from the issue of self-expression, the new policy makes it impossible for students to create any kind of decent living space.

Arriving at their rooms for the first time last month, many students found the walls covered in blotchy discolored spots, peeling paint, poorly patched holes, and, in some cases, graffiti, which was usually obscene. While it may be humorous to read another student’s lewd poetry for the first time, it’s not the kind of thing most people will want to look at every day for the next ten months. The same goes for the other aesthetic problems. The obvious solution would be to paint the walls.

However, the school clearly felt that it wasn’t worth its resources to take care of the problem and paint the walls itself. Now students who are willing to fix this problem with their own time and money are being told they can’t. It doesn’t seem right to be paying so much money for dorm rooms with blotchy, written-on walls, but to be told that we can’t even improve our dorm rooms at our own expense is simply ridiculous.

Pomona’s room painting policy is also suggestive of certain suburban housing developments that strictly regulate the way in which its residents decorate their houses. The goal of these regulations is to create a sense of snobbish sameness and exclusivity. It would be unfortunate if Pomona had these same goals in mind with its policy.

That’s unlikely though. The probable motivation for the policy is simply one of money. Not enough students were returning their rooms to their original color, forcing the college to do it for them, which became very costly. It is understandable that the administration did not want to be responsible for repainting hundreds of dorm rooms over the summer. This policy, however, is not the best way to solve the problem.

Pomona has a remarkable atmosphere of trust and cooperation between students that is not found at many other colleges. This new, punitive room painting policy is one step away from that and one step toward situation of conflict between the administration and students.

In this community of ideas it should be a simple enough matter to find a way to allow students to continue painting their rooms while not forcing the college to repaint the rooms at the end of the year. If there had been student input and debate involved with creating the new policy, an idea such as this would surely have been found.

If the administration felt it must apply fines in this situation, they should be applied at the end of the year. This way, students could continue painting their rooms, and only those who weren’t responsible enough to return the rooms to their original color would be penalized. With this small change the administration could still collect the fine money without denying students the benefits of self-expression that painting their rooms provides an avenue towards. As things stand now, nobody is winning.