Penn Dorm Makes (Short) New York Times List of Really Crappy Dorms

“Hill College House” by Daderot – Own work. Licensed under Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.

The New York Times had a story today about the dorms that colleges never, ever show you on those peppy-student-ambassador-walking-backward tours, and the very first dorm from hell on its list was Penn’s Hill College House.

“A brick fortress surrounded by a moat,” as the Times describes it, Hill has rooms that are “small” and “narrow,” bars on the first-floor windows (well, duh), and no air-conditioning. Tour guides, the article notes, tend to linger longer touring the Quad, with its “masonry curlicues and graceful courtyards,” and rush right past Hill, which one former resident told the Times is “old,” “leaky” and “favored by vermin,” not to mention “interesting long pink insects, which I don’t think I’ve ever seen before.”

Also on the shit list? Dorms at the universities of Iowa, South Florida, Illinois Urbana-Champaign and Cornell.

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