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Photo By Jymi Bolden
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McMicken Hall
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By Melissa Huelsman -- Editor, The News Record
"UC, eh?," outsiders say with little effort to mask the disappointment. "Great basketball team." Sometimes they mention the nationally acclaimed College-Conservatory of Music or the College of Design, Architecture, Art and Planning. Mostly, it's basketball.
"Why do you go there?" the bolder ones ask, suspecting academic or financial constraints. "I've heard UC (insert your favorite rumor here)."
Like many other students, I've defended my choice for higher education more times than I can remember. After years of dealing with the flux of constant construction amid the difficulties of navigating this homage to bureaucracy, I appreciate friends' concerns but tell them to save their pity for better causes. UC is more than just basketball.
The university that brought you the makers of Benadryl, the oral polio vaccine and the National Weather Service will have spent $1 billion from 1991 until 2008 on a capital plan to improve campus facilities and the quality of student life. The benefits of a 24-hour campus to future Bearcats are obvious, but the wrecking balls, jackhammers and temporary plywood fences are such a common sight that some current students claim to attend the University of Construction.
There's construction, and then there's construction.
The loftiest goal to rise from piles of triplicate forms, surviving Board of Trustee meetings and various student discussions is the nearly $200 million Student Life Complex. In January, the jackhammers move to Tangeman University Center, the student union, beginning a $32 million upgrade including additional classroom space and an auditorium/movie theater ensconced in a semi-circular post-modern addition with skylights surrounding the steeple.
UC has said for years its goal is a pedestrian campus, and the Student Life Complex's design is the proof: Campus Drive will be the home of the $20 million Braid Building eventually housing student groups, services and restaurants.
At least no one else will get a ticket for the illegal right turn onto Campus Drive at Nippert Stadium or harass another main-gate parking attendant who doesn't care if you are "just running in and out of McMicken." No matter how good your excuse, you cannot drive through a building.
The logistics committee meets in the fall quarter to decide what temporary shelter the organizations will call home for the next two to three years until Braid's completion.
University architects are considering housing some organizations in state-of-the-art equipped trailers on Brodie Plaza -- students are trading rumors and predictions about tents or inflatable buildings. We have to drown the noise of the jackhammers somehow, and we choose laughter.
The Student Life Complex also includes an $80 million student recreation center replacing the power plant and bookstore. University architects described winding pathways, "gentle fountains" and a small meeting area with a balcony view of the recreation center during one of the many meetings to keep students informed. If Nick Vehr's team can bring the Olympics to Cincinnati in 2012, the recreation center's $8 million, 50-meter pool could apply to serve as the aquatic center.
In addition to approved projects, UC's Board of Trustees recently gave the go-ahead to Hummel Properties' proposal to build an off-campus rental area and 950-car garage on the west side of Clifton Avenue between the Sigma Alpha Epsilon house and the Kappa Sigma house.
It takes time to build a better campus, and when I'm frustrated looking through the gaps in the plywood walls revealing overgrown grass, dirt and broken concrete, I try to remember walking this campus my freshman year in 1989, seeing the newly built Shoemaker Center.
The Good Old Days
After 13 seasons of playing basketball at Riverfront Coliseum and Cincinnati Gardens, the Bearcats came home to the new 13,176-seat arena. University buzz was all about a man who might be able to regain the Bearcat glory days of Jack Twyman or Oscar Robertson. Students considered Bob Huggins a star from his first day on campus, and the mess of construction a thing of the past. We had a shiny new arena, so who cared?
UC was a different place for me then than it is now. Classes were my excuse for going to campus so I could hang out in the Rhine Room, the quads or near the Shoe. Luckily, I found plenty of other students also in pursuit of the party degree to keep me company while someone else paid the tuition.
We laughed and predicted the UC domination of college basketball within five years. We camped and partied in Nippert Stadium the night before parking passes went on sale. We even smoked cigarettes inside of buildings without shame.
Times were good. Full-time tuition and fees cost $893 per quarter for the average Arts and Sciences' student, instead of the $2,069 charged today. Factor the change in the value of the dollar, yen and the rotation of the earth on its axis, and that's still a lot more money, especially now that I'm paying my own bills.
I still see problems at UC, but back then I thought I attended the worst university in the world except for this shiny new arena and the hope of a great basketball team. I found myself thick in the "UC shuffle" walking from building to building told by countless secretaries that my forms were only half-complete after waiting the standard hour in line. Professors returned tests with Ds and Cs though I whined I'd studied all night with a "study group" until the day I quit before flunking out.
When I returned to UC a few years ago, I discovered a faculty and staff eager to help the majority of students who are serious about learning. We still have the space-wasters as I used to be, but this university is creating programs to make the UC shuffle excuse as tired as the homework-hungry dog.
If I Had Done Then What I Do Now
"Forget the glitz and glamour of construction for a second," says Senior Vice President and West Campus Provost Anthony Perzigian. "This is what we're excited about." That's the plan for the UC Collaboration for Student Success and, according to Perzigian, the first university document to use the phrase "UC shuffle."
The collaboration began with 19 well-respected members including Perzigian, representatives of nine colleges and other administrators discussing ways to enhance student learning and satisfaction. Their findings acknowledge the lack of advising coordination and course-acceptance discrepancies between colleges and lists goals, actions and intended outcomes for increasing student support and awareness of resources. The group's Principles and Implementation Plan recognizes that students "find little humor in our arcana and bureaucracy."
This is the rarely discussed side of UC -- the one with a striking level of honesty and an academic construction plan that rivals the building of the Student Life Complex, the one that offers an increasing amount of resources and services to its more than 33,000 students. The tuition and fees didn't rise so much for nothing.
The university offers an emergency walk-in counseling clinic, a Listening Post for a non-judgmental ear and support systems such as the Women's Center and the African-American Cultural Research Center. This is also the pilot year of the Department of Educational Services' mentoring program accepting 60 proteges.
"Students who ask other students for help are the ones who get in trouble," said Lowanne Jones, a Fulbright Scholar and Camargo Fellow who has worked with UC students for the last two decades as an associate English professor and various administrative positions including director of undergraduate studies in the English department. I've heard stories from other English students about the times when Jones "rolled up her sleeves and worked the bureaucracy" to help students graduate on time. I've watched her reassure faculty their 8 a.m. lecture will fill to room capacity, eat her breakfast, send a few e-mails and answer several questions from people popping in -- all within a half hour.
Her presence gives me hope the complete implementation of collaboration's plans will happen. I've watched many people in many departments as devoted as Perzigian and Jones who go out of their way to help students, despite the limitations of any one office within a bureaucracy.
Nothing's That Simple
"You can get out of UC as much as you put in it," said Lucy Croft, director of student organizations and activities. "You have to choose to work in and out of the classroom, though, because no one is going to give you anything but a chance."
Aside from academic opportunities, students can participate in more than 200 registered student groups. Though many are active with extra-curricular activities, some students complain of an increasing level of apathy on campus.
The free series of Friday Night Live events including visits from top comedians, concerts and movies usually draws a big crowd, and an estimated 4,500 attended a speech by Nobel Prize winner Elie Wiesel about the dangers of indifference to humanitarian causes. Not every group has such support.
Only 50 students attended a Jerry Springer visit, but I'm not sure if that is apathy or good sense.
When the UC Students for Life sponsored the Genocide Awareness Project's (GAP) campus visit, complete with graphic 6-by-13-feet photographs of lynchings of African Americans, Holocaust victims and aborted fetuses on McMicken lawn, UC braced for a protest. Administrators respected the Students for Life's decision to sponsor the visit as an opportunity for discussion of the possible comparisons of genocide to abortion but called emergency meetings to develop a safe-passage route for those wishing to avoid the photos and to create safe-rooms and counseling services for potentially affected students.
Students Organized Against Rape planned a peaceful counter-demonstration with members wearing bright yellow T-shirts that said, "We refuse racist, sexist, anti-Semitic rhetoric!" Most students ignored the GAP project's display, and the group left a day earlier than planned.
During a conference for college media in New York City, I talked with students from across the country who said they also hear complaints about student apathy. UC students blame the difficulties of parking and other constraints inherent in a commuter campus, but it seems to me an increasing amount of students think of college as a business deal instead of the place for protests and pep rallies.
"I used to have more students who asked to read James Joyce or Jane Austen," Jones said. "Now they're much more vocationally orientated."
I've heard students compare their college experience to service at a drive-thru window and watched them practically jump for joy when they can schedule classes to be on campus only two days a week.
It's not about apathy. Many students are too busy working to pay for classes or taking care of their families to enjoy the traditional college experience.
Are You a Student or Staff?
I was nervous returning to college when I was 26. It didn't help when the cashiers at the bookstore told me I needed to show my faculty identification card to get a discount.
I've met students who worked as laborers, waitresses and secretaries before realizing they needed a degree to make more money. I've met parents who returned after their children enrolled in college. I've met people who made a lot of money but decided to return to school to find a more satisfying career.
According to the latest enrollment summary (October 1999), nearly 5,000 full- and part-time UC students are age 25 or older. Laura Miser, associate director for institutional and financial planning, said she's seen an increase in non-traditional students for the last 10 years.
"Life has changed," she said. "Most students can't spend 15 credit hours at school any more."
The days of long lines are leaving with the "UC shuffle" excuse. Students can go online for course registration, parking passes and textbooks saving hours of time and frustration.
This isn't the UC most people think they know. Everyone can see the wrecking balls and hear about parking nightmares, but the people behind this bureaucracy seem to be working to meet the changing needs of its students. ©
