It was a Monday night. Hundreds of students crammed into a public hearing in the College Park Adult Education Center demanding a campus Metro stop. The students, donning corduroy blazers and round, plastic-rimmed glasses, hotly contested plans for the Green Line. This particular Monday was May 19, 1980.

They were too late. Two years prior, the College Park City Council selected a station location that intersected Calvert Road, not because it was particularly accessible but because it would restore the ambiance of old-town College Park by closing the road (which at the time was a thoroughfare carrying 12,000 cars a day) and require federal funding for the construction of what is now Paint Branch Parkway.

Thus, by choosing ambiance over accessibility, the city of College Park got a Metro station on its fringes that has left commuters with long treks to the campus and students vulnerable to repeated robberies. Some ambiance.

With the Purple Line in its planning stages, history gives us a second chance for an easily accessible stop along Campus Drive. Unfortunately, the administration is pushing for an alignment along the relatively isolated Stadium Drive. In the words of university President Dan Mote, a stop on Campus Drive “would irreversibly damage the beauty of the campus entrance.” Additionally, history professor Gay Gullickson was quoted in The Diamondback saying, “If the light rail comes to campus, it will fundamentally change the ambiance.”

Beauty? Ambiance? Whether it’s 1980 or 2007, history appears to be stuck on a grating repeat.

Before we throw our hands up in defeat, we should look at history a little closer. In 1983, the future of the Green Line was in jeopardy because the city council threatened to sue Metro to stop construction of a portion of the track that would adversely impact the residents of Calvert Hills. Luckily, in 1985, Metro engineers devised a compromise, committing to develop noise-reduction structures alongside Calvert Hills. The engineers then displayed a touch of creative flair by proposing the construction of a lake to provide fill to mitigate flooding along the track north of College Park. The project saved $2 million for Metro by eliminating the need to transport earth over long distances and created popular Lake Artemesia.

If the Purple Line is viewed as a challenge to beautify instead of a blemish to bury, students and faculty can lead the way in proposing improvements for a Campus Drive alignment that is both functional and fashionable. Last month, the School of Architecture hosted landscape artist Patricia Johanson who, among numerous projects, worked with sanitation engineers to conceal an enormous waste treatment facility in San Francisco within a sculpture of a garter snake. This may sound bizarre, but with a little creativity, the project turned a potential eyesore into something embraced by the community.

If San Francisco can hide a sewage plant, College Park can certainly hide some overhead wires. We can work with Metro to design power lines fitting with College Park’s façade on a quiet and safe route. The project could pay for itself by eliminating the need for a costly feasibility study of the Stadium Drive route and minimizing the overall length of the route through the campus.

We need the Student Government Association to step up and join the Graduate Student Government in providing a unified student voice in support of a Campus Drive alignment. We must ask the administration to drop its request for a Stadium Drive feasibility study and instead focus on the development of an agreeable Campus Drive plan.

Unfortunately, we’re already losing the battle. Terrapin Club Executive Director Greg Enloe sent out an open letter to Terrapin Club members Nov. 15 asking for alumni support of the administration’s position. Mote also recently announced East Campus Developer FP Argo’s support of a Stadium Drive alignment.

By scuttling the route off to Stadium Drive, the university is admitting defeat on its ability to consider novel ideas and creatively solve problems. But students don’t have to. Without powerful and immediate action, we already know how the story will end – more decades of inconvenience, danger and regrets on a fumbled opportunity.

Benjamin Johnson is a senior physics major. He can be reached at katsuo@umd.edu.