Residents of over-21 dorms met with University Housing, the Residence Hall Association and the Undergraduate Student Government Tuesday night to protest a proposal making Neely Hall the only dorm for older students.

Stephen Kirk, assistant director of Residence Life, said the proposal is designed to meet the rising demands for older students wanting to live on campus.

At double occupancy, Neely Hall can house 800 students, Kirk said. After we create singles, there will be between 650 and 700 spaces available. Neely would become the only 21-and-over dorm if this change happens.

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Currently, there are approximately 1,000 students over 21 that want to live on campus, and University Housing cannot accommodate all of them, Kirk said.

There are 462 spaces available for students over 21 in Allen and Warren Halls and the Northwest Annex. The proposal is an attempt to house more students, he said.

If the conversion happens, housing officials said Neely Hall will become the only dorm for students over 21 in the fall of 1996.

We see the population in older students increasing, and right now we do not have enough housing for them, Kirk said. And we need to meet that need. For us, Neely seems to be a pretty good choice. It already has cooking facilities on every floor and suite bathrooms that the older students seem to like. Also, Neely has a pretty low return rate among students. If the return rate in a building is not real high, there won’t be a whole lot of people put out because of the change.

However, the proposal was not received well by current residents of the over-21 dorms. Paul Bailey and Joyce Wright, residents of Allen 2, brought in 176 signatures on a petition opposing the change.

We had no idea what was going on, Wright said. We saw signs up that really didn’t make sense, and the way the proposal was explained to us at the hall meeting made it sound like it (the proposal) was set in stone and there was nothing we could do about it.

Edward L. Jones, director of University Housing, said the proposal to make Allen and Warren Halls regular dorms and to discontinue housing students at the Northwest Annex was first drafted two weeks ago. He said nothing was set in stone, and that Housing only wanted student feedback about the proposal.

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We are not going to make a decision today, Jones said. There are a lot of options we have to look at. There are a lot of misconceptions about what is happening right now, and we need to work through that.

Housing is in the process of working with the proposal, Jones said.

What we are doing now is going back and forth, back and forth, until there is something workable, Jones said. We have to consider today’s students as well as tomorrow’s students.

Some residents, such as Michael Sanders of Allen 1, said they left the meeting feeling a little more assured about what was happening around them.

The meeting made me feel more positive about what was going on, Sanders said. There were a lot of rumors going around, and after talking with these people and having it put on record, I feel better about the University. I don’t know how much to trust what they said, but I do feel better.