The housing department is now called the Department of Housing and Residence Life and has new offices on South Green.
A new academic year brings a location change and a new name for Ohio University’s Department of Residential Housing.
As of Aug. 1, the department is now called the Department of Housing and Residential Life, Pete Trentacoste, the department’s executive director, said in an email.
The previous name was selected when the Housing and Residence Life departments merged in 2009, Trentacoste said, but he added many people in the department “did not care for the name or were indifferent towards it.”
“We did some benchmarking and found that most student housing departments of our size, referred to themselves as Housing & Residence Life,” Trentacoste said in an email. “As a result, we made a request to change the name.”
The change is a reflection of what the department has already been doing, he added. However, Trentacost said the department has recently absorbed Conference Services, which had been part of the old Housing department but merged with Event Services when Housing and Residence Life became one department in 2009.
The timing of the change made sense, Trentacoste said, because the department has a new home in the Living Learning Center near the newly constructed Carr, Luchs, Sowle and Tanaka Halls on South Green. New stationery, business cards and other supplies also needed change.
Additionally, the department was running out of space for its professional and student staff in its office in Chubb Hall.
“We had student desks lining the hallway of our former space in Chubb Hall and when we recently took over Conference Services, we had to explore some creative solutions to accommodate the relocation of the Assistant Director of Conference Services,” Trentacoste said.
Other universities typically have their housing and residence life departments in one of their housing properties, Trentacoste said.
By giving up the office space in Chubb, Trentacoste said, “there was benefit to campus from a space management perspective.”
University College and Enrollment Management are moving into Housing and Residence Life’s old space in Chubb,Shawn Bolin, director of university planning and space management, said in an email.
Bolin said both departments “had repurposed conference rooms to meet their staffing office needs.”
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