Who’s Responsible?

Kids at GW complain about a lot of things. We get frustrated with Package Services, annoyed at Health and Safety Inspections, and bored of our GWorld options.

Who’s responsible, you ask? This all falls under the “Auxiliary and Institutional Services” department at GW. I had a chance to sit down with its director, Nancy Haaga, last week. She’s the one that is always quoted in regards to the above complaints.

I guess the headline of the meeting with her–the “that’s-news-to-me” element, if you will–is that Health and Safety Inspections began last week, with little change despite last semester’s controversy.

But my conversation with Haaga had an underlying theme which I hope to get out in two articles on Monday and Tuesday: even though students complain about a lot of things, they don’t give specifics and thus the university doesn’t hear them. As Haaga described, it’s simple customer service: the university will respond to genuine, well-thought out complaints, and not just random outbursts of injustice and unfairness.

The university, she said, receives a lot of “gross generalizations,” such as “there is student concern that independent contractors inspecting our rooms.”

“People can say it’s a concern, but based on what?” she said. “I didn’t hear about a single problem.” And perhaps that is the issue.

So look for two articles, one on Monday and the other on Tuesday, about happenings in Haaga’s department and how, in her opinion, students’ complaints can be heard.