One would expect a university to keep its promises. One would expect that if said university pledged funds toward a graduate student center, it would make good on its word. However, when said university is this one, don’t expect much.
If you’ve looked around the campus lately, you might have noticed some nice things – a brand new alumni center, for example. However, graduate students might be more attentive to what’s missing – the graduate center they were promised by the university nearly fifteen years ago. To add insult to injury, some of the funds that were originally set aside for the graduate center were used to finance the Samuel Riggs IV Alumni Center.
In 1994, the university said that all future rent profits from the Graduate Gardens and Graduate Hills apartments would be used to fund a multitude of projects, most notably, a graduate student center. In case you don’t get out much, there’s still no graduate center. Nor any plans in the works to build one. And it’s 2007.
So why would the university pledge these funds and go back on its word? The university seemed to believe that not enough students “championed” the cause of the graduate center, so it placed the project on the back burner, and instead used the received funds for projects such as the alumni center and renovations on the Computer Science Instructional Center. While that’s all fine and good in theory, neither of these projects specifically benefit the graduate students, and many graduate students don’t even utilize them. The focus for these funds has not been on the graduate students, as originally intended, and, while new renovations and buildings are great, graduate students are getting shafted on the funds they were promised more than a decade ago. They’re missing out on projects that could create for them a more positive experience at the university.
It’s time for the administration to stop making excuses as to why the funds from Graduate Hills and Graduate Gardens are being allocated for projects that don’t promote a better graduate experience. While the Division of Student Affairs claims it has used portions of the funds for graduate student living at both communities, the funds are having a much stronger impact on the general university population than they are on the graduate population, and that in and of itself shows that the funds are not being used as they were originally intended to be. We encourage the Graduate Student Government to stand up and demand that the funds it was promised so long ago be used properly, and that the administration start making plans to follow through on their original pledge. If the university continues to ignore its own promises to the graduate student population, who is to say it won’t eventually start ignoring the pledges it makes to the student population as a whole? We have to keep the university accountable, and this is a good place to start.
