Approximately 80 students who have stayed in Volunteer Hall without interruption since fall 2008 will have to pack up their belongings if they wish to stay on campus this summer.
Students staying for summer term or mini-term courses, as well as students sticking around for university-sponsored internships, co-ops and student teaching opportunities, can only stay in Reese Hall if they wish to stay on campus this summer, Tim Johnson said, University Housing associate director.
The lone exception is those students who currently live in Gibbs Hall can remain.
University housing was offered at the apartment-style Volunteer Hall in summer 2009 -- the first summer in which UT had controlled management of the former Knoxville Place -- but cleaning necessitated the move.
"Our goal, what we hoped, is that we would always use Volunteer Hall," Johnson said. "But what we found when we opened this year is that we had so many student and parent complaints about the condition of the apartments. We felt like we had to close it this summer, so that we could do a really deep cleaning of all the rooms."
Though the campus will play host to about 100 different groups over the semester and Volunteer Hall, in particular, will host some of them, Johnson said the plan was to close Volunteer Hall by mid-July for a thorough cleaning.
Despite the summer timetable in place, he said he was unsure how long the cleaning would take, but university-style apartments take longer.
"We've never done a deep cleaning of Volunteer Hall, so we really don't know," Johnson said.
Males and females alike will stay in Reese Hall, with the genders separated between the east and west towers of the hall, he said.
Johnson said the university hasn't held summer housing in the same hall for back-to-back years since the closing of Greve Hall.
University Housing finds it convenient to use the apartment-style Volunteer Hall for summer housing, so Johnson hopes summer housing can return to Volunteer Hall soon.
"(There's) more flexibility, more space there," he said. "Private bedrooms, you've got a lot of students going in there who don't know each other for summer school. So that private bedroom makes it, I think, in my mind, more convenient for the students."
With summer 2009 housing, students who stayed in Volunteer Hall for the 2008-2009 academic year could choose to stay for the 2009-2010 academic year and receive a summer-housing discounted price of about $500 rent for the entire summer. That same type of discount will not exist with this summer's housing.
That discount was a part of the switch in management from Knoxville Place to Volunteer Hall, Johnson said.
"Even if we had kept it (Vol Hall) open, that wasn't available coming this year," Johnson said. "We did that for the first year as we bought the property. As we went through that process, working with the students who had contracts with the former owners, we agreed, since we were going from monthly rental rates to semesterly and we were increasing the rates a little bit, that we would make that first summer a fixed amount."
That caused the amount to end up about what the year rental would have been from month-to-month, he said.
"That was just a one-time thing," Johnson said. "It wasn't something we were going to do forever."
If Volunteer Hall had been home to university housing once again in summer 2010, Johnson said the rates would have been the same as Reese Hall's rates for summer 2010, which he estimated would be about $1,100.
But he said despite the fact that an e-mail sent out to students living in Volunteer Hall specified a "university-sponsored" internship, co-op or student teaching opportunity in order to be able to stay in Reese Hall during the summer, Johnson said housing would work with students living in Volunteer Hall currently, since those students had the expectation that summer 2010 would function the same as summer 2009.
But Johnson said this only applies to current Volunteer Hall residents, and students in other dorms, wishing to stay in town to work or pursue other interests not within their major, would need to make other arrangements most likely.
Students need to fill out a form when they apply for housing if they plan to pursue internships while staying in summer housing.
Russell Hinson, senior in economics, stayed in Vol Hall during the spring 2009, fall 2009 and spring 2010 semesters but decided not to stay during summer 2009, even with the discounted price option.
With the return to traditional pricing and the need to move to Reese Hall, Hinson said he would probably pursue alternative options this summer if he had to stay in Knoxville.
"I'd probably move off campus because it's pretty easy to find cheaper prices and find housing over the summer off campus," Hinson said.