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Nap Rooms for University Students - Good Idea?


Theda Baratheon

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10 hours ago, Dr. Pepper said:

Not even close.  Millennial generation starts around 1982 with it going for roughly 20 years.  Various think tanks have the ending point anywhere from 1997 (way too early imo) to 2004.  This is the generation that came of age during the social media boom, were expected to start graduating high school at the millennium.  The generation most certainly did not start in 1995.  

 

 

Sorry DrP isn't that a fairly obvious typo that I meant 1985? I don't think that no-one was born between 1985 and 1995, nor do I think that all generations are about 25 years with some overlap at each end, meaning a 20 year period EXCEPT for the millennial generation; and nor do I think that a generation lasting 10 years is the first to overtake the Babyboomers generation for sheer numbers, despite covering half as manyyears.

 

I've not seen 1997 suggested as the end of the millenial generation - that's way too early, the most popular dates seem to be 2001 and 2008; but then, people like to start/end these things with large events that mean nothing to the unborn, or anyone under the age of 5; whether that generation is affected differently by the event is going to depend on it's after-effects 20 years down the line. My understanding is that 2008 is becoming the more popular end-year as the after affects of the crash in the market are having a more direct impact on more people than 9/11. Either way though, I will stand by my point that the start/end dates are wooly, and only really applied in their specifics by those who need to tick boxes about them. Some people born in the mid-80s consider themselves GenX, and identify better with those, whilst some consider themselves Millenials and identify better with that cohort.

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11 hours ago, zelticgar said:

sorry. I thought that smiley face at the end of my post might have tipped you off that I was joking.  Honestly I'm fine letting people nap wherever and whenever they want. Not something that I've ever done or needed though.

I personally think people who need naps are simply not able to manage their time effectively.  I get it for some professions (medical, public safety, researchers,etc. ) but for regular undergrads or 9 to 5 professionals it just seems like overkill and a good indicator that people needing a nap are not effective at managing their time or personal wellness.  

It's hard to manage time effectively when you may be juggling your hours at uni, hours of study outside of uni, and working part time so that you can actually afford to live in a house and eat. So,etimes there just aren't enough hours in the day.

14 hours ago, Isis said:

Obviously they should have a separate prayer room as most universities I have visited do. Ours is CLEARLY labelled as a multi faith prayer room as well. 

I think my uni may actually have specific prayer rooms for different religions, as well as a more general prayer room. I'm surprised to hear of a university that doesn't have a prayer room at all though

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I... don't understand why any university needs prayer rooms of any type at all. - isn't that what churches / synagogues / mosques are for?

 

Surely places of education are (or should be) entirely secular. Maybe I'm just old; or maybe it's one of those differences across the Atlantic.

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Yep, agree with Which Tyler. University/faculty/college/whatever is a secular place and does not need a prayer room, nor should it have one IMO. I am surprised to read that some universities have them, especially different ones designated to different religions. I guess I can imagine a general room for prayer (which can really just be a room of silence to go meditate or have your 15 minutes of not-talking) which would cover every religion, but I do not think there is need for a separate chapel/mosque/temple/what have you of every religion. Except if you are at school of theology I guess.

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2 minutes ago, Which Tyler said:

I... don't understand why any university needs prayer rooms of any type at all. - isn't that what churches / synagogues / mosques are for?

 

Surely places of education are (or should be) entirely secular. Maybe I'm just old; or maybe it's one of those differences across the Atlantic.



Pretty sure UK universities have prayer rooms too. Certainly some workplaces do.

The idea is that you can take a moment to pray without trekking all the way over to church/mosque/synagogue/whatever. They're particularly useful for Muslims who can use them to perform their daily prayers without disturbing everyone/being disturbed several times a day. It's really got nothing to o with the secularity of the institute as a whole.

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1 hour ago, Which Tyler said:

I... don't understand why any university needs prayer rooms of any type at all. - isn't that what churches / synagogues / mosques are for?

 

Surely places of education are (or should be) entirely secular. Maybe I'm just old; or maybe it's one of those differences across the Atlantic.

Which side of the Atlantic are you on? Because I'm in London. I work at an extremely diverse School which quite rightly has a multi faith prayer room. It also has a bar. Nobody is forced to enter either. They are there as options students and staff may choose as part of their experience at the School.

Allowing students to practice their religion in a single, purposed room out of the entire campus has absolutely nothing to do with the education provided. Do you think that students who have a full day of classes should have to leave and attend a separate place of worship in a different location once or more during the School day? 

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1 hour ago, Which Tyler said:

East side, though as I also said, I'm old. I simply don't see the need for this, nor why it is the responsibility of a secular educational institution to provide prayer space for any religion.

I don't think it's necessarily a responsibility as such, just a nice thing to provide that makes the lives of many students a little bit easier.

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4 hours ago, Which Tyler said:

East side, though as I also said, I'm old. I simply don't see the need for this, nor why it is the responsibility of a secular educational institution to provide prayer space for any religion.

Because it's recognising that students can be religious and making accommodation for them. It's not like anyone is being forced to use them, or religious teaching has become mandatory. But religion is a very real part of everyday life and it makes sense to accommodate for it. (Not to mention a lack of prayer room or other such accommodation for religious types is arguably some form of indirect discrimination).

eta; and as polishgenius said, it's also not the responsibility of the university to provide cafes, or coffee stands, or bars, but they do.

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6 hours ago, Buckwheat said:

Yep, agree with Which Tyler. University/faculty/college/whatever is a secular place and does not need a prayer room, nor should it have one IMO. I am surprised to read that some universities have them, especially different ones designated to different religions. I guess I can imagine a general room for prayer (which can really just be a room of silence to go meditate or have your 15 minutes of not-talking) which would cover every religion, but I do not think there is need for a separate chapel/mosque/temple/what have you of every religion. Except if you are at school of theology I guess.

I'm not actually sure how many separate prayer rooms there are (it's a pretty big building and I only ever end up in a small fraction of it) but here is certainly a specific Muslim prayer room. And we also have a chapel in the middle of the school too (I guess this is for historical reasons but wouldn't like to say for certain)

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22 hours ago, Which Tyler said:

East side, though as I also said, I'm old. I simply don't see the need for this, nor why it is the responsibility of a secular educational institution to provide prayer space for any religion.

Ever visited any of the oldest university colleges in the UK, like Oxford or Cambridge? They all have their own chapels. :)

What a university would be doing by refusing to have a prayer room would be denying the religious freedom of their students, essentially telling students who wish to pray during the normal working hours that they are not going to be welcomed. That's a very dangerous precedent to set.

There's also a safety issue - people are going to pray anyway, so you may as well provide a space for them to do so. I once almost fell over a staff member praying in one of our teaching labs and also another time a student who was kneeling in a stairwell. 

Anyway, this insensitivity to people's religious freedoms (which are not harming anybody else in any way in this context) is quite a disturbing trait and would make me wonder what other intolerances you might harbour.

Oh hey, good timing on this piece popping up today:

The Power of Napping

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1 hour ago, Isis said:

What a university would be doing by refusing to have a prayer room would be denying the religious freedom of their students, essentially telling students who wish to pray during the normal working hours that they are not going to be welcomed. That's a very dangerous precedent to set.

There's also a safety issue - people are going to pray anyway, so you may as well provide a space for them to do so. I once almost fell over a staff member praying in one of our teaching labs and also another time a student who was kneeling in a stairwell. 

Anyway, this insensitivity to people's religious freedoms (which are not harming anybody else in any way in this context) is quite a disturbing trait and would make me wonder what other intolerances you might harbour.

I do not think it would be denying anything - because by that logic, any institution or organisation that does not have dedicated prayer rooms is denying religious rights of their visitors. I do not think anybody is suggesting every company, shopping centre, kindergarten, school or office should have a prayer room for workers or people who spend time in them.

The way I see it, university is a public institution, and faith is a personal thing - something that might be very important for somebody's life, but it is still based on personal taste and preferences, so not comparable with needs of eating, drinking, sleeping etc. If a Church or other religious institution demands of its members that they pray only in certain places, they should provide such places, not ask other institutions to provide them.

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1 hour ago, Buckwheat said:

The way I see it, university is a public institution, and faith is a personal thing - something that might be very important for somebody's life, but it is still based on personal taste and preferences, so not comparable with needs of eating, drinking, sleeping etc. If a Church or other religious institution demands of its members that they pray only in certain places, they should provide such places, not ask other institutions to provide them.

That is not the issue. The issue is a desire for individuals to pray/practice your religion WITHOUT leaving their place of study/work. Many universities feel that it is no big problem to provide a room to enable students to do this without leaving the campus. Nothing else needs to be provided by anyone else - other than the uni be willing to give up one room for this purpose. Seems like a pretty small thing that makes a big difference to (potential) students.

It says a lot to me that some people do not seem to grasp the importance of being inclusive  - the importance to everybody.

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Well, how "small" a thing this is is dependant on how much space this university has at its disposal. Coming from a faculty where not a week passed without hearing somebody complaining about the lack of place in the building and where we had some lessons in hired rooms in a high school across the street and where the libraries needed to stack books on window sills and one on top of each other between already too-narrow rows of shelves and where even the dedicated "study/reading room" was way too small for all the students that needed place in it, I see dedicating a room - or several ones - to that as a big deal. If the faculty for some reason decided to change, for example, one of the already too few classrooms or library rooms into a prayer room, the majority of the staff and students would be outraged - and rightly so, IMO, primarily because of the logistical problems.

I do not think it is wrong of universities to have a chapel or whatever, just do not see it as necessary or required, because, as I said, by that logic every building should have one, and that is clearly not the case.

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37 minutes ago, Buckwheat said:

Well, how "small" a thing this is is dependant on how much space this university has at its disposal. Coming from a faculty where not a week passed without hearing somebody complaining about the lack of place in the building and where we had some lessons in hired rooms in a high school across the street and where the libraries needed to stack books on window sills and one on top of each other between already too-narrow rows of shelves and where even the dedicated "study/reading room" was way too small for all the students that needed place in it, I see dedicating a room - or several ones - to that as a big deal. If the faculty for some reason decided to change, for example, one of the already too few classrooms or library rooms into a prayer room, the majority of the staff and students would be outraged - and rightly so, IMO, primarily because of the logistical problems.

I do not think it is wrong of universities to have a chapel or whatever, just do not see it as necessary or required, because, as I said, by that logic every building should have one, and that is clearly not the case.

 


Yeah, but now you're adding caveats to your original protest of 'universities should not have prayer rooms'. An institution not having a prayer room because it's lacking for space would compromise the education it offers is different from an institution not having a prayer room because it thinks they're incompatible with learning or something.

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4 hours ago, Buckwheat said:

I do not think it would be denying anything - because by that logic, any institution or organisation that does not have dedicated prayer rooms is denying religious rights of their visitors. I do not think anybody is suggesting every company, shopping centre, kindergarten, school or office should have a prayer room for workers or people who spend time in them.

If a university were like those other institutions, this would be a fair point. But most aren't. Students either move or travel to the institution for most of the year: they're there for long hours, too. A full-time student spends much more time in their university than a person visiting a shopping centre spends there.

Also, those institutions are frequently located in areas which simply don't have places of worship for faiths that might be well represented in the student population but not in the general population of that area. Lack of faith facilities would mean students traveling long distances to worship.

And importantly, students face unusual challenges in all areas of their lives, including their faith. That's why many have dedicated University chaplains, or equivalents.

I don't think that every university needs to have a prayer room, but I think most do. And I say that as a very firmly atheist person.

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I'd agree that it depends on the campus - some are like mini-towns or neighbourhoods, and quite isolated from anything else. They have health facilities and housing and swimming pools and so on, reasonable enough to add prayer room/institutions/whatever. A smaller campus that's a regular building in a city though...I'd agree there's no automatic justification just because it's a university. 

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On 22/10/2016 at 8:00 AM, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

Interesting.  According to this my children are "Millenial" and "Post-Millenial" respectively.  It it normal to have siblings in different generations?

Well my eldest brother is 1969 and more of a Boomer than X, then I have 4 siblings that are clear X, and in 83 I used to be Y except people wanted to keep shitting on us for longer so Y got folded into Millenial (which I recall starting off as being referred to Generation ME - like Windows ME). So yes its normal.

For all I hate generational groupings, folding Y into Millenial was just absurd and not because I actually object to being grouped with Millenials (I don't).  Those who had a substantial part of their childhood and education without the internet vs those who have had the internet their entire lives is such a clear and massive line to draw between how people will see the world. I got the internet in high school, and I was an early adopter on the grand scheme of things, but that was still more than enough time to get a grasp of how education worked without the internet and I still remain in awe of just how huge an impact it has on everything. I'll never take it for granted.

None of this is related to nap rooms, which I think are a fantastic idea. The more research we get on humans and sleep, the more we find we are doing it utterly wrong. I'd love to see set 9-5 hours disappear as well, they only suit a minority of people and hamper most. Some need earlier, most need later, and some are perfect as they are. Almost all teenagers would benefit from school schedule being offset later into the day as well, but school schedule is primarily set up around what can work for parents rather than what is actually optimal for kids learning and development - which is in some ways more than reasonable, it has to be something that can be made to work. Humans are a diverse group, yet we keep trying to hammer one size fits all to so many different things.

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