Since returning to campus from winter break, students who live in certain dorms have noticed hundreds of ants crawling around their buildings — in the halls, in the bathrooms and on the beds. Complaints have come from Pittman, Stockard, Hefley and Stewart Hall, and students said they are hesitant to report the infestation to the university.
“It was the night before school started this semester,” Julia Crumrine, a freshman IMC major, said. “I was about to turn off my lamp when I looked at my headboard behind me, and it was covered in ants. There were more than I could count, just crawling all across it.”
Crumrine lives on the second floor of Pittman Hall, and she said it looked like the ants were getting into her room from a crack in the wall.
“We eventually moved my headboard into my bathroom and moved my bed away from the wall to find that the ants were coming from a little hole in our wall,” Crumrine said. “It’s not like we left food out or anything while we were gone. They just came in.”
While the ants have been gone from her room for several days, Crumrine said several other girls in the dorm have experienced similar issues, and many people have stopped putting in maintenance requests, opting to buy their own at-home pesticides instead.
“(Maintenance wasn’t) going to be able to come help until the next day, so I just had to try and kill the ants myself. It was so awful,” Crumrine said. “People now just text in our dorm group chat to borrow ant spray.”
Matthew Spurling, a freshman geological engineer, said he noticed the infestation last fall, shortly after moving into Stockard, but it seems to have worsened while students were gone over the five-week winter break.
“Every time I go into the showers, there are just ants all over the walls,” he said. “I don’t know what it’s from, but I haven’t reported it to housing or anything.”
Jackson Dear, a freshman engineering major who also lives in Stockard, said he and his roommate have never reported their ant problem to any university official either.
“We didn’t report anything to maintenance because when we came back, it was a week before school started, and we just didn’t know who to talk to, so we handled it ourselves,” Dear said. “We had ants all over our fridge and our room, all by the beds and in the window. It took us a long time to finally get them out.”
Dear also said the ants on his floor of Stockard are still in the hallways and in the bathroom.
“I have seen ants in the bathrooms on the sink counters and on the floor,” he said. “I’ve never seen anybody spraying for bugs or anything, and I’ve never heard of anybody doing anything to fix it.”
The Department of Student Housing said they were unable to speak on the matter and referred the reporter to the university’s public relations department, which could not be immediately reached at time of publication.
