Imagine the Hole full of college students

I've been quite close to this issue for a number of years.

First of all, Beacon Hill residents do not despise Suffolk, nor do they despise Suffolk students. Suffolk students are enthusiastic and welcome contributors to a lot of neighborhood activities. Most recently, I saw a crew of them out decorating lampposts for Christmas.

Second, while you're technically correct that Suffolk properties are not "in the middle of" Beacon Hill, they are certainly adjacent to residential areas: Temple, Hancock, Joy, Myrtle streets etc.

Third, it's not the presence of Suffolk buildings that's a problem, it's the demographics of the surrounding apartment population. When Suffolk moved the law school from Temple Street over to Tremont, and moved a bunch of undergraduate activity to Temple, the total Suffolk presence on the North Slope didn't change, but the demographics did. 24 year old professionals were replaced by 18 year olds living unsupervised for the first time in their lives, in apartments throughout the neighborhood. The result, borne out by ample police log data, was a huge upswing in noise complaints, urine, vomit, and feces on the sidewalk and doorsteps, and other quality-of-life issues. Eventually, Suffolk started doing a much better job of policing its off campus student population, and things improved a lot, but they were kind of icky for a while. And by noise complaints, I'm not referring to music or the occasional loud party, which are entirely acceptable in an urban setting, I'm talking about fights, people on the roof at three in the morning swearing and threatening to throw each other off, people throwing stuff out of windows, etc.

Residents are concerned that once the percentage of kids living in a neighborhood (be they Suffolk students or others) rises above a certain point, there's a "tipping point" and the neighborhood rapidly becomes "a student neighborhood" That has implications for density, for noise, and, most importantly, for the overall sense of community.

Students are, almost by definition, short timers. They arrive not knowing the rules; it takes time for them to learn how to live in a dense urban neighborhood, and they don't have much incentive to invest their time and effort into long term activities because they know they'll be moving on. You don't see a lot of college students planting trees, or maintaining gardens, or sweeping the sidewalks, or taking the time to call the city when something is broken. A high percentage of students almost invariably correlates with a low level of civic engagement.

That's not a knock on the students, nor on the university they attend; it's just a fact of demographics. A neighborhood of all students, or a neighborhood of all retirees, or a neighborhood of all rich people who only occupy their houses for 2 months out of the year -- none of these are healthy, vibrant neighborhoods, even though there's nothing intrinsically wrong with any of those groups. Neighborhoods need diversity in order to thrive.

I know a lot of Suffolk students, and I know a lot of neighbors who are quite upset that their objection to an 800 bed dorm was portrayed as having been an objection to students in general or to Suffolk in particular.