Opinion columns reflect the views of their authors, not of MU Student News.
We spent a year campaigning for midnight library hours, and we won, and I am glad. Now let me say the unpopular part: the midnight hours treat a symptom. The disease is that between 8 a.m. and 4 p.m. — the hours when most of us are actually here — this school contains approximately nowhere quiet to sit.
Count the options honestly. The library’s quiet floor: excellent, and full by 10 a.m. The common rooms: social spaces, as they should be. The cafeteria: a social space with cutlery percussion. The corridors: benches positioned to catch maximum foot traffic. That’s the map. If your free period doesn’t coincide with a library seat, your options are noise or more noise.
The objection writes itself: school is a social place, and students should toughen up. But we don’t apply that logic anywhere else. We don’t tell the basketball team to practise in a crowded corridor and toughen up. Concentration is a working condition, and for reading, writing and memorising, quiet is the equipment.
Here is the annoying thing: fixing this costs almost nothing. It doesn’t require construction. It requires signs and will. Designate two classrooms per floor as silent study rooms during free periods — they stand empty anyway. Put the quiet corner of the renovated common room behind an actual rule instead of a polite suggestion. Publish which rooms are free when, which the timetable system already knows.
The library petition proved the demand: four hundred signatures for quiet at midnight. I promise you the demand at 11 a.m. is larger. It just hasn’t found its petition yet. Consider this a first signature.
I anticipate the counterargument about supervision — empty classrooms need a responsible adult, and staff are stretched. Fine: then start with two rooms, not ten, supervised on rotation the way the library’s quiet floor already is, and let the occupancy numbers make the case for more. The library petition worked because it asked for something specific, cheap and measurable. So does this. Two rooms. Signs. A term’s trial. If the rooms sit empty, I will write the retraction column myself, and it will be very quiet where I write it.
