Tuesday, April 3, 2007
Jealousy filled my eyes while visiting the University of Tulsa during spring break. I went with some friends to their fitness center during several weekday afternoons and I was amazed to find that I could get any weight bench or machine without having to wait.
Those of you who frequent the Student Recreation and Fitness Center here know that getting a free machine at this time can be about as easy as finding a parking space in downtown New York. One of my Tulsa friends elevated my envy even more by assuring me that fitness center there was hardly ever more crowded than when I visited.
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Ours is a great university and academic expansion is a good thing to have, but when I look around campus right now, the most prominent construction project I find is a $3.5 million effort to build new offices on the Wescoe terraces.
The University of Tulsa enrolls only 4,125 students, about 16 percent of our enrollment, yet their recreation center is easily as good as ours.
True, Tulsa is a private university with a yearly cost of attendance of almost $30,000. At Kansas we charge in-state students an average of less than $10,000 per year. In light of this, I am not frustrated at finding our recreation center inferior; I just wish we had more space on campus dedicated solely to student use.
For being the largest university in Kansas, there are few places strictly reserved for us students to hang out. I can list the main ones on my fingers: the recreation center, two main libraries, a few computer labs, and about three floors of the Union. The pool at Robinson Center, for instance, is open to regular students only 2 hours and 45 minutes each weekday.
Coming back to my jealousy, one of the few buildings here at Kansas dedicated purely for students’ enjoyment, the recreation center, was pushed forward by the students themselves, not University administration. Even now, each one of us is paying back, with student fees, the Kansas Legislature loan that paid for the recreation center’s construction.
Ours is a great university and academic expansion is a good thing to have, but when I look around campus right now, the most prominent construction project I find is a $3.5 million effort to build new offices on the Wescoe terraces.
As a University, we must find a balance between expansion for the sake of academic excellence and expansion for the sake of student enjoyment. The one major student-directed construction on campus during the past few years, the recreation center, had to be pushed through and paid for by students themselves. Being competitive academically is important, but we can’t forget that the main focus of college should be the students themselves — not the aura of a prestigious university.
Sam Schneider is a Topeka junior in English.
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