The Spire

Patrick Ryan ’27

Staff Writer

How many people have to die before the school takes action? Just last Wednesday, first-year Stacy Howard shockingly lost her life after tumbling down three flights of concrete stairs. According to eyewitness testimonies, Howard, who was on her way to breakfast at Kimball, slipped on the very first step at the infamous staircase at the bottom of campus. While off balance, Stacy accidentally spilt her hot latte on her face, which likely did not improve her predicament. She then fell, in a manner akin to a sack of potatoes, down ninety individual stairs, landing in a heap at the bottom of the hill. This disturbing incident brings the death toll to 13 for the 2023-2024 school year, continuing a grisly trend that has been seen on campus. In last year alone, 45 undergraduates perished at the hands of the stairs, while countless more have endured ankle sprains, humerus snaps, and other various contusions. However, this macabre phenomenon is nothing new on Mt. Saint James. Who could forget the hapless members of the class of 1875, who were forced to graduate early due to the overwhelming cruelty of the stairs. Or perhaps recall the class of 1933 who suffered through the Great Nor’Easter of ‘33 that made every step a dangerous deathtrap. Much to the college’s dismay however, the rate has not shown any sign of decreasing. The student death toll has actually seen an uptick since the completion of the science complex. Daily, students are wounded by the wobbly stones that line the entrance of the building. For whatever reason, random tiles will buckle and shift when a student steps on them, potentially endangering them. Even your dear author has found himself nearly face planting onto the concrete after tripping on an unstable tile (Don’t worry, he’s OK). All of these harrowing facts demand an immediate response to this crisis at hand. What solution could possibly tackle students falling down stairs you ask? Stair lifts. Stair lifts on every staircase, on every railing, at every part of campus. No more should students be forced to risk their lives walking from class to class, or from their dorm to dinner. Some would argue that installing stair lifts throughout campus would be a superfluous action, and a gross misallocation of school funds. First, any opposition to this proposal is thinly-veiled hatred for the safety of Holy Cross’s poor students. Second, considering the cost for a single stair lift is approximately three thousand dollars, the school could outfit every staircase on campus using only the annual tuition of a single student. In the Holy Cross of the future, students will comfortably glide up and down the Hill, no longer threatened by the savageness of the primitive stairs. As students, we alone have the power to reach this utopia. Lobby your SGA representative today to make this much-needed change to campus a reality!