OUR VEIW: New living center should not be priority

Nearly 500 students bought housing contracts in the six new student living centers being constructed on the west side of campus. Advertised as convenient and comfortable, they are supposed to be the best on-campus living facilities in the intermountain west. They were fancy. They were flashy. They smelled like fresh paint.

But, they weren’t ready in time. Only 200 students were able to move in to their dorms before the beginning of school. The rest of the students have been shunted to the Towers.

The new buildings were expected to be finished by the beginning of fall 2006, yet three of them are now slated to be ready for tenants in December. The question that is being asked by students is, “How could the time required have been misjudged by a whole semester?”

Though the situation could be very problematic, the university and Parsons Construction have made efforts to compensate for the inconvenience. Ninety-two displaced students that were supposed to be in building D have recieved $1000 in housing credits, and Parsons has offered to help the students move when the time comes.

Beyond the simple subject of irritation at continued construction and inconvenience to a few hundred is the question of whether the new living centers was a wise choice to spend money on. With enrollment down and empty rooms in dorms across campus, it takes guts to spill thousands of dollars into a project that looks somewhat unpromising.

The construction of these new buildings created a ripple effect, with the renovation of Carousel Square in the Taggart Student Center to provide an adequate dining area for the students living in the new dorms. There was also talk last year of expanding the TSC computer lab to help alieviate long waits a good study space close at hand.

The idea is that such an enticing living space would draw in more students and boost enrollment. But students don’t go to college to have a nice apartment. They go to college to get a good education.

An example of a better investment of funds is the $13 million engineering labratory being planned, or the construction of the Merrill-Cazier Library, dedicated last year. Students serious about their studies would be more concerned with the research and learning facilities on campus, not the housing situation.

We urge administration to consider how they can cultivate the academic environment of the university before they begin constructing state-of-the-art dormitories. The university could benefit much more from a state-of-the-art physics lab or computer system.