Liberty University makes good use of old Ramada Inn

Don’t expect room service or maid service at the Lynchburg Inn. Complementary shampoo? Forget it.

The former Ramada Inn on Odd Fellows Road might be bare bones by hotel standards, but for a dormitory, it’s jackpot. The unconventional dormitory comes with perks left over from its hotel days: full-sized beds, private bathrooms, built-in televisions and an outdoor pool.

“We call it the LU-mada,” said Liberty University student Nick Pretty, one of 432 students living there.

Liberty bought the hotel last summer and began housing students there to alleviate a housing crunch fueled by rising enrollment and “record numbers” of returning students requesting to live on campus, said housing director Beatriz Saunders.

For two semesters, hotel guests and college students coexisted. The lobby doubled as a student common room, the pool and courtyard doubled as an after-class hangout, and the on-site café served meals to students and hotel guests alike.

Though the students and hotel guest lived in relative harmony, the arrangement was not ideal.

“There was just an awkwardness about it,” Saunders said.

This fall, Liberty converted the hotel into full-time student housing, and it’s booked to full capacity.

Located three miles from main campus, the Lynchburg Inn is the university’s only off-site dormitory. Though a bus service provides rides every 30 minutes, students cite the distance from main campus as the Inn’s biggest drawback.

By the same token, the relative isolation also prompts a sense of camaraderie, said senior Patrick Sims, who is living there for the second year. Students from different halls see each other on a regular basis riding the bus or passing through the lobby, so by the end of the year, almost everyone at the hotel is a familiar face.

“The strangest part would probably be living so close to the girls’ dorms,” Sims said. “They’re on the opposite side of the wall sometimes.”

On main campus, dormitory buildings are either all-male or all-female. The student code of conduct, The Liberty Way, forbids visitation from members of the opposite sex except at specially designated times. At the Lynchburg Inn, the same rules apply. The hotel’s four buildings are set up so that the men’s hallways are on the opposite side of the buildings from the women’s hallways.

The unorthodox set-up can cause the Inn to be misunderstood, said Kayode Ilesanmi, who has had to set the record straight on false rumors of room service and coed dorms.

“Most students on Main Campus don’t understand how it is to live here.”

More than the pool and double beds, Ilesanmi cited the camaraderie as the best part of the LU-mada.

“It’s like a small community,” he said.

The Lynchburg Inn houses everyone from freshmen to graduate students, along with a strong contingent of international students. Some requested to live there; others were assigned.

Hall mates Ariela Fajardo and Briana Henry, both freshmen, said they ended up being assigned to the The Inn because they were late completing their financial check-in.

Henry was unfazed by the unorthodox dorm assignment, but Fajardo was skeptical.

“At first I was kind of discouraged because I thought, ‘I’m not going to have the college life, I’m not going to meet friends.’”

So far, Fajardo can’t complain. The Inn has provided an authentic, if somewhat surreal, college experience.

Her room has the markings of a typical dorm room: bed propped on cinderblocks for extra storage space, photographs of friends on the wall, mini fridge.

Only a few small details betray its former life as a hotel: the heavy floral drapes covering the window, and, of course, the full-sized bed.