Should living in a small room pave the way to big rewards?

Drew Sickinger and Kyle Wojtanowicz think so. The freshmen wrote a letter Winter Quarter to Residential Life claiming their 7-by-13 room at Public Affairs Residential College was one of the smallest doubles on campus.

For all their trouble however, they did not want an apology — they wanted a rebate, or a room at Kemper. Or both.

But would that open the floodgates for dissatisfied dorm-dwellers?

“Certainly this could set a dangerous precedent, but if it weren’t for a few wise, strong patriots back in the 1770s, we’d still be a British colony,” Wojtanowicz says. “I have to draw the line somewhere — I need to throw the gauntlet to the face of tyranny, and I think that’s what I’m doing.”

For Wojtanowicz, aWeinberg freshman, tyranny means a room so small the beds legally cannot be de-bunked, a room in which Ethernet ports are fickle and where a hole in the wall has gaped unrepaired since Fall Quarter.

Also a room with barred windows.

“We had had a series of robberies on our first floor at PARC,” Wojtanowicz says. “Lo and behold, instead of putting out security, the powers that be decided to bar us in.”

The university installed metal bars preventing windows from being opened more than three inches. Finally, they were removed “after numerous complaints of being imprisoned in this god-forsaken hell-hole,” Wojtanowicz says.

Even worse, Sickinger says such close confines have caused him to fight with his roommate.

“Living in such small quarters, Kyle gets on my nerves,” he says. “We don’t even have a place to put our laundry.”

Sickinger, a McCormick freshman, says he spoke with Residential Life Director Gregg Kindle on Tuesday, and the director said the pair would receive neither rebates nor preference in the housing lottery. Kindle declined to comment.

But Wojtanowicz says maintenance has been notified about the hole.

“The sad and ironic part of the matter is that the hole really wasn’t the problem,” Wojtanowicz says. “It was merely one of the many examples of how fucking terrible it is to live in this goddamn room.”