Recent upheavals, online and offline, in the KAIST community have been centered on whether or not faculty members of the university should have the first choice when booking for sports facilities. As there are a limited number of courts and fields to play on, both students and faculty members argue that it is their right to have priority over the use. The KAIST Herald investigates both sides of the argument.

KAIST has good sports facilities open to all students and faculty members. The utilization of facilities is facilitated with the help of a well-established online reservation system for those who want to use the facilities. However, there has been an ongoing controversy over the priority given to faculty members in the reservation system, as there were too many reservations made under the same name which belonged to one of the faculty members. However, a more careful investigation revealed that there was a misunderstanding for certain times were reserved for other official purposes rather than for faculty members’ private sports activity. Even without the misunderstanding, giving priority to faculty members in reserving sports facilities still exists, and many students are furious about this system. However, I think this policy of giving priority to faculty members should be preserved for the following reasons.

Every fine workplace provides systematic welfare benefits to their workers. KAIST is an educational institute for students, but is also a workplace for faculty members. It can be thought in a way that students are the clients and faculty members are the employees. Thinking that the policy of giving priority of using workplace facility to workers as one of the welfare benefits, it does not seem so wrong. Though this policy can make the clients a bit uncomfortable, if it contributes to the welfare and the work skill improvement of the workers, this policy has no reason to be changed. The school encourages and promotes faculty members to have some time for exercising and outdoor activities. To support this policy, the school allows employees to use the sports facilities more readily. I do not see anything foul in this policy as faculty members are provided with one of the required welfare benefits from their workplace. Faculty members deserve to get advantage, as it will contribute to their welfare and also increase their efficiency in their work, which is exactly what welfare benefits are designed for. Therefore, there is no reason to discontinue this current policy of giving advantages to faculty members.

As mentioned earlier, there has been exaggerations over the preferential rights given to faculty members. Unlike what most students first thought, only three reservations were made for the faculty members a week. Other reservations were made under the same name with different official purposes, such as class activities, student clubs, and special sports matches. Furthermore, if there are no advantages for the faculty members, they will face more difficulty making reservations compared to students. One thing that will surely work as a barrier for faculty members in using sports facility is the time. If the faculty members have to rely on the times left over, it will be harder for them to play sports because unlike most students who live in dormitories and have no difficulty using the facilities even late into the night, faculty members mostly live outside of the KAIST campus and will face many difficulties for late night reservations. As faculty members have full time jobs and live outside of campus, their possible times to use the facilities are more limited than that of students. These circumstances are all considered in the current policy.

The current policy of giving certain advantages to faculty members should be maintained to give them a chance to keep playing sports. It is a required privilege of the faculty members and the policy is necessary since they have more time limitations in using sports facilities. A better compromise would be reducing the time given to the faculty members, but not giving them any priority would nearly stop them from using the facilities altogether. Therefore, the current policy of giving priority to faculty members should perhaps be amended but continued.

A number of recent posts on ARA, KAIST’s online forum, have brought students’ attention to the issue of booking sporting venues on our university campus. According to what several students have claimed on the website, the vast majority of preferable time slots for using both the outdoor fields and indoor courts have been reserved months in advance by a single person, who turned out to be the reservation system manager. Further inquiries by the student body subsequently revealed that the reservations were made for the staff sports teams to play recreationally on campus facilities. The point of controversy is that these advanced bookings in effect give priority to the staff over the students in assigning usage of the sporting grounds, to which many students have raised their objection. And indeed, common sense clearly dictates that this current arrangement equates to wrongful treatment of our university’s students.

One easily identifiable problem with giving the staff preferential treatment in using sports facilities is that these facilities are intended more for the students’ use than that of anybody else. A university campus is a place designed to allow its student body to study and, in the case of a scientific institute such as KAIST, also meant to encourage collaboration between students and professors to produce quality research. It follows from this understanding that virtually every aspect of the university infrastructure is geared towards facilitating student activities. Classrooms and laboratories are intended for students to study and research at, dormitories are for the students to live in, cafeterias are for the students to dine at, and so on. The likes of football fields are thus clearly meant primarily for the students to use either for recreational or competitive purposes and, consequently, maintain good health through exercise. That the university staff has somehow gained advantage in reserving these facilities is very puzzling considering how their employment is made possible only by the students’ and professors’ very existence.

Furthermore, this preferential treatment that the staff receives over the students is a wrongful practice. The students should have just as much of a right to make use of the university’s facilities as the staff do, and to expedite one group’s access to these venues at the expense of blocking out the other group is unjust. Whereas a number of exceptional cases may be justifiably prioritized, such as when the fields and gymnasiums are used for graduation ceremonies or the annual KAIST-POSTECH Science War, a staff member should not have the right to effectively prevent students from using the sports facilities so that he can enjoy sporting activities with his colleagues.

In fact, considering the typical schedules and circumstances that they find themselves in, our university’s students have a solid case for being given priority over the staff when it comes to booking venues. KAIST is an institute famed for its academic rigor and the intense competition its students face throughout each semester. If there ever was a group of people who needed to cool off and relax, it is our university’s students, and they ought to be able to count on using sports as a means of releasing that built-up stress. Furthermore, the majority of KAIST students happen to come from outside of Daejeon and thus, live on campus during the semesters, making our university a home for many. We thus see that KAIST students are in need of recreational opportunities whenever time permits, either between or after their lectures, research work, and recitation classes. These opportunities should preferably be on-campus, or at the very least, somewhere nearby. It is hence only logical that the campus facilities are operated in such a way as to be most convenient for the students.