You see homeless asleep on the street and you assume a sympathetic attitude. When you see students asleep in classrooms and libraries, the assumption is quite different. A reaction fraught with displeasure is their reward. This is hardly fair. Inevitably, the onus falls on the administration of this great institution to hold back the veritable tidal swell of sleepy masses.

Being one myself, it is impossible to imagine a reasonable person resisting the urge to indulge in a little snooze on one of those comfy red leather couches in the Hart House library—especially when confronted with the other option: reading. If the university is going to construct these traps to entice the already underslept and overstudied, they could at least be overt with it. The construction of small booths within certain key buildings and libraries would do much to eliminate the many annoyances associated with the tired. Snoring is the most prominent of these irritations. There is no sound more grating and counterproductive to one’s successful ingestion of knowledge than that of another person snoring. These booths would have to be soundproof, of course, or at least capable of dampening the noises I’ve heard emanating from my fellow students.

Due to the sickening lack of compassion for the sleepy on the part of the university, we are doomed to our groggy trudges between class and makeshift bed. Students have been spotted sleeping on or in everything in sight. Walls, floors, benches, couches, chairs, their cars, the subway, the grass, it’s all fair game when deprived of the right to accessible bedding. A call for compassion is in order, let alone preventing the reaction of a professor when they find one of their bright-eyed pupils snoozing during a lecture.

In a fiscal sense, these changes need not be costly or invasive. Only the addition of a soft surface to already flat ones would be required. Desks and tables could be modified to flip over onto a soft side. Unused classrooms could be outfitted with cushions and designated as communal bedrooms. Perhaps small burrows could be dug into the ground and padded to allow for the rest of an individual. The sleepy don’t ask for much, just this small comfort in their school existence. The advantages of this idea are clear and numerous since the only other option, a good night’s sleep, has become as preposterous a notion as the chamber pot.