At the beginning of every semester, as students arrive on campus and the highline becomes repopulated with its residents, an all too familiar scenario unfolds: panic as the Room of Requirement floods with questions, anxiety about canceled flights and delayed entry permits, breakdowns over the notorious unresponsiveness of Student Finance and Student Mobility and an endless race to keep oneself up to date with the ever-changing Covid-19 guidelines on campus.

If anything has been a hallmark of NYU Abu Dhabi’s management of the pandemic, it’s the administration’s haphazard manner of communication and, oftentimes, the lack of transparency in communicating key decisions. It is no surprise then that many look toward Facebook as a better avenue for posing their inquiries. The student body’s proclivity toward informal channels of communication such as Facebook groups is not simply a matter of convenience. It is an outcome of recurring exhibitions of indifference from the administration’s side. When students do not receive adequate responses, despite numerous tags of urgency, a culture of peer reliance is organically cultivated where students feel more confident seeking information from each other.

However, there is an inherent problem with using Facebook for such urgent and timely communication: there is no standardized flow of information across the student body. It is empirically impossible for everyone to be notified of every single post that is published on RoR or follow everything that is happening in the group on their own. More importantly, RoR is more than just a repository of questions: students use it for ramblings of all sorts, from rants to mundane campus discussions. It is no surprise then that information gets lost amid a storm of posts and comments, especially during overwhelmingly uncertain times such as the start of the semester.

Attempts by the university to communicate with the student body, such as through town halls, have lately become emblematic of information dumps where the student body is forced to sit through the administration’s hollow attempts at damage control for their ineffective communication. The administration also has a tendency to produce generalized memos that often fail to take geographical and regional specificity into consideration. For example, a lack of sufficient response from the administration forced students from India, Pakistan, Nepal, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh to reach out to the administration with collective emails and open letters to understand the complexity of their situation with respect to flights, entry permits and visas.

Students should not have to lobby the administration by banding together in such a way. They should not have to spend so much time and energy simply urging the administration to be sensitive to their specific situations. Our campus is a diverse community and in a time of global vaccine and travel inequity, specific accommodations to students traveling from “red countries” are the bare minimum. To create a truly inclusive campus, such specific considerations should be a staple, not an afterthought or a reaction.

That being said, many pieces of communication from the administration are riddled with veiled statements seeking to evade any elaboration on relevant background or contextual information. Such a lack of transparency is often explained as the university’s attempt to shelter students from information that might be uncertain at the moment. But delaying the disclosure of important behind the scenes details only exacerbates the situation by leading to distrust and outrage.

A similar case in point is the recent personal stipend fiasco where students were informed about recent changes in study support. Granted, at times the administration might only have incomplete or tentative information at their disposal, but their decision to not keep students updated when making policy changes of this scale is incomprehensible. A promise of transparency must mean clarity in the disclosure of the decision-making process as it unfolds in real time. Is it too much for students to ask the administration to trust them with information that can alter the trajectory of their entire undergraduate careers?

The blame, however, does not lie with the individual members of these departments who have been working diligently through extremely turbulent times. But when important departments such as Student Finance and Student Mobility operate under easily avoidable structural issues such as understaffing or inefficient communication channels, they have a negative impact on students’ mental and financial wellbeing. Student Finance, for example, has remained understaffed for almost a semester now and as such its unresponsiveness to student queries regarding FAB cards or assistantship pay does not come off as astonishing. Despite this being persistently pointed out by the student body, no substantial administrative additions have been made to its staff. Staff members continue to be overworked and inundated with questions varying from FAB cards to assistantship payments and communication between the student body and the department continues to remain fractured. A vast majority of our student body is dependent on the university’s travel and financial support. Not prioritizing the stability of these departments through adequate staff management means falling short of the university’s commitment to having a truly global campus.

Unfortunately, this leads to excessive reliance on Student Government for important communication. The mandate of Student Government is to be the bridge between the administration and the student body, but oftentimes is left to explain complicated statements put out by the administration and their ramifications. For example, following communication regarding the change in stipend provision, Student Government members were left to manage students’ expectations about how the purchasing power of falcon dirhams will be adjusted. Similarly, when there is outrage over unreceived entry permits or flight tickets, Student Government members are expected to manage students’ anxieties as the administration continues to ignore emails and requests. Here, we must not forget that they too are students, with full academic workloads, other commitments and are also personally affected by these aforementioned circumstances. At best, this represents an extension of the already complex and inefficient bureaucratic chain of communication within the NYUAD administration. At worst, it is a gross misplacement of burden.

As students, we realize the overwhelming pressure on the administration to manage such rapidly changing situations. No one is realistically expecting them to have all the answers — we just want them to extend toward us the same level of compassion, trust and goodwill in communication they expect from us. The distrust and disillusionment created by the lack of timely and accurate communication is avoidable if the university is willing to rethink its communication bureaucracy in order for it to not supersede student interest and welfare.