Student - April 2, 2009

QUIET ROOMS

The Plant Sciences Group’s new Radix building is going to have a quiet room. People will be able to retreat to this room on the ground floor for a moment of ‘reflection’. The Forum will be getting a quiet room in due course, too.

Radix facility manager Okko Kuiper deliberately does not talk in terms of a prayer room. ‘If you make it a prayer room, then you start having to meet various religious criteria for such a room. A Muslim wants to pray facing East, a Catholic wants incense, a Protestant doesn’t want any images. As far as possible, it should be a welcoming and neutral room.’

A room has already been found on the ground floor, and it will be turned into two rooms with an entrance hall. One room is for reflection, the other for mothers who want to express milk. The alterations are still to be made, and Kuiper thinks it will all be ready by September at the latest.

The Forum has plans for a quiet room too. But facility manager Joris Fortuin says that might take until the new education building – Orion – is finished. At present all the rooms in the Forum are in use. The call for quiet rooms comes mainly from the Progressive Students Party. Fortuin: ‘Students raised this issue But so did several other groups. People feel the lack of that sort of space in the Forum. It is rather a hectic building, and there’s nowhere you can retreat to for a little while.’