“Hell is truth seen too late – duty neglected in its season.”- Tyron EdwardsIf a meeting last week with graduate students is any indication, the university is poised to abandon key parts of its mission to develop 38 acres on the east side of Route 1 into a major player on the retail scene. Everyone agrees that the planned East Campus should be a place where an academic community can flourish and could provide a much-needed boost to improving downtown, but for now, business interests running rampant could leave graduate students out in the cold.
Members of the Graduate Student Government were appalled Friday when presented with outrageous rental rates for graduate student housing on East Campus. The “subsidized” rentals, priced at more than $950 per person in a two-bedroom apartment, are unaffordable for most graduate students and the unsubsidized units, which comprise nearly 80 percent of the development, may be out of reach entirely.
But don’t worry, grad students. The Birchmere concert venue will be within walking distance! And so will every piece of overpriced, mass-produced chain-store merchandise your heart could desire! Please. Developer F.P. Argo’s giddiness about the Birchmere is solely driven by their failure to bring it to Downtown Silver Spring and the fact that it’s a swan song for former Montgomery County Executive Doug Duncan (now the university’s vice president for administrative affairs).
They don’t care that graduate students – or any students, for that matter – care more about a town center that makes their community more livable than a high-end concert hall. And overpriced graduate student housing with useless amenities isn’t worth working yourself into poverty over.
F.P. Argo’s very notion that graduate students are demanding luxurious public/private housing partnerships seems to be the product of research done on housing such as The Towers at University Town Center. Well, here’s a bit of news for F.P. Argo: That’s an undergraduate complex. Undergraduates move in with little to no debt. Graduate students have different priorities, and they often have their undergraduate debt to worry about.
Graduate students aren’t bankrolled by their parents. They live on tiny stipends, many of which are stretched to support spouses and families. The development plan, as it stands now, would bleed graduate students and in turn would bleed the university, as it ultimately finances the students’ budgets.
This is the classic tale of “The Emperor’s New Clothes”: We’re being robbed naked and no one is around to shame us back to our senses. F.P. Argo is giving university administrators exactly what they want, but not what the university community needs.
The development will quell the insecurities we have about being a second-rate college town, but will destroy a critical opportunity to give graduate students a foothold in the heart of the city. The university is trying to use the project to vault past the fast-casual restaurants and rowdy bars of downtown, but it is missing a critical strategy: make the initial development less price intensive to allow a mature community of graduate students to move in and thrive. Their tastes and interests will preclude the intrusion of unsavory nightlife without bowing to excessive commercialism.
We support the university’s initiative to move beyond the chintzy downtown character of the present, but administrators must realize how supporting the needs of graduate students is essential to a building classier future.
POLICY:The signed letters, columns and cartoon represent only the opinions of the authors. The staff editorial represents the opinion of The Diamondback’s editorial board and is the responsibility of the editor in chief.
