As students from the Class of 2019 began to trickle back onto campus from their Study Away locations, many of them found that their assigned rooms did not match the roommate groups they had indicated on their housing applications. When these students reached out to Residential Education to inquire how and when they could change their rooms, they found the department in the middle of a “ResEdesign.”

In order to finally get some answers on the housing catastrophe, we managed to organize a meeting with a ResEd employee. The employee agreed to speak with us, but insisted on remaining anonymous. They arrived late.

“I had to get Marc from the salon,” they said, referring to their pet porcupine.

“The department is trying to reinvent itself right now. We hope that we can bring residents closer to the larger Abu Dhabi community by organizing events such as last weekend’s Lovely Brunch, in which we help students explore locations in Abu Dhabi that are not necessarily on campus.”

We asked Fa Ked Ova, Class of 2019, how he felt about ResEd’s focus on programming. Ova, who attended the Lovely Brunch, is currently assigned to live in the A5C laundry closet.

“It’s not that I don’t enjoy the events that ResEd organizes, I just think that they are missing the point. If a hospital organized an amazing U2 concert, but had to cancel all surgeries for the duration of that concert, I would be quite upset with them. I like U2, but hospitals should take care of their patients first, organize concerts later.”

Ova also revealed to us that his best friend of three years had two vacant single rooms in his apartment, so his rooming arrangement in the laundry closet left him utterly perplexed.

When we brought up the issue of unresolved room change requests with the ResEd employee, they seemed flustered.

“Well, that has not even been brought to my attention. Somebody else in the department mostly handles that stuff. As far as I’m concerned the Res might as well stand for Restaurant,” they laughed, unaware that this lack of concern for students was exactly what was angering the students in the first place.

When we searched for the person who was supposed to be in charge of the room assignments, members of the department kept referring us to each other or to an employee named “Edward.” Edward’s last name remained a mystery to us, even as his name kept reappearing in internal communications leaked by a Residential Assistant. Memo after memo referred to “Edward” who was allegedly in charge of handling this or that. Every issue students had had since the university opened was supposedly handled by Edward.

We asked why Edward had not been fired and why there had been no investigation into these accidents by the department.

“He’s the head of the department. None of us hold any power over him,” we were told. Although we had many other questions, our insider had to leave to walk Max, their teacup pig.

Our investigative team poured over seven years of communications before finally finding that first email that started it all. It seemed to have been a prank email from one of the students in the first class. It read:

Edward Res. Ed Res. God, they are incompetent.