Just today, I received an email about the Pray-Harrold Advisory Committee about a meeting I can’t go to tomorrow and also about some “milestones and schedules” in the project. According to this document, the Pray-Harrold project is but one Legislative approval step away for construction, and that should be resolved very soon. According to this same document, construction will commence on November 15, 2009, and the project will be complete on December 21, 2012.
(Note to the few folks who entered the PH renovation pool: “beginning construction” for the purposes of the pool means actual construction, not the likely ribbon cutting ceremony that will be in mid-November 2009. And we might just have to change this pool into the more unpredictable “ending of construction” on Pray-Harrold pool).
As but an alternate representative to the committee (and one whose attendance at these meetings has been intermittent to say the least), my assessment of the process has been kind of mixed. At one point, I described it here as a train-wreck. I don’t think that’s true anymore, but there is something oddly unsatisfying and yet inevitable about this project.
Let me give you a couple of examples:
A couple months back, a faculty colleague of mine who is also on the Pray-Harrold advisory committee placed a side bet with me regarding a meeting where we “interviewed” instructional technology design consultants. This person, who wasn’t able to attend, said if I went to the meeting and did not find it a waste of time, he would give me $5. If I found it to be a waste of time, I would receive nothing.
Well, I don’t know if it was “useful” exactly, but I don’t know if it was a waste of time either. Like many things associated with the Pray-Harrold renovation meetings, it just “was.” I mean, people came and gave presentations about instructional technology; these people admitted that we didn’t have enough money to do too much, and they admitted we it was difficult to predict the future of instructional technology anyway; the committee debated the various strengths and weaknesses of the proposals presented; and in the end, the advisory committee (as I understood the process at least) said that either of these groups would be acceptable, depending on what the contractor thought. Meaning that at the end of the meeting, it didn’t seem to make that much difference, at least to me.
Another example: there was an issue of how many large (like 200-300 students) lecture halls would be left on the second floor with the remodeling, one or two. Initially, the decision for one lecture hall was made, but there was an odd procedural skirmish over the decision. I’ve been on a fair number of committees and such, some of them contentious, but this was the first time it got down to the nitty-gritty of Robert’s Rules of Order and interpretations of the meaning of an abstention vote. In the end, we had another meeting and another discussion, I advanced a proposal that we have two large lecture halls instead of one, and it was defeated, thus bringing us back to the previous spot.
I made the proposal on behalf of my department, but to be honest, I’m not sure how much difference one or two large lecture halls will make, and I’m somewhat indifferent about the result of the vote. While I have plenty of colleagues in my department who would not agree with this, it seems likely to me that most lecture hall formats for most subjects will be replaced by online teaching in the next couple years anyway. So again, what difference will it make?
And really, this has been a reoccurring problem of the whole process. I actually think that the suits are trying hard on this project, and I have seen some changes as a result of input from the advisory committee. For example, a few months ago, the idea that some unit or department would move out of Pray-Harrold to help free up space in the building was a complete non-starter. Now, on the agenda for tomorrow’s meeting, is discussion about the permanent relocation of “one or more units” to other space on campus. So that’s progress.
But for the most part, the whole process and project has a sort of potentially regretful inevitability to it, and it seems completely out of anyone’s control to do anything about it. There isn’t enough money to really pay for a serious and significant remodeling, which means that while I think there will be noticeable changes, it is likely not be enough to make most people happy. Worse yet, we don’t exactly know what’s going to happen until the construction is done (will we need those lecture halls? should we have had more computer labs after all? did we spend a bunch of money on instructional technology that will be obsolete quickly? etc., etc.), and then it will be too late.
Something about all this reminded me of Thomas Pynchon and some of his amusing and dystopian fiction, notably The Crying of Lot 49. Pynchon’s interests in “entropy” have to do with the inevitability of systems kind of decaying (ice cubes melting to get to the same temperature as the drink it is cooling), and of language and meaning itself decaying into a sort of non-signifying jibberish. If you’ve read any Pynchon, you probably know what I mean; if you haven’t, you can learn a little more about this here.
Hopefully I’ll be wildly wrong about all this….
Perhaps it’s all a bit unsettling because P-H is about to become a ward of the State!
What do you mean? EMU is already kind of a ward of the state, right?
Early this year, the PrayHarrold Advisory Committee, voted to call on the Administration – academic affairs and physical plant in particular – to seriously examine ways that some faculty offices or academic programs could be moved out of PrayHarrold, permanently, to lessen the huge problem of overcrowding in the building. This was done after examining data on the incredible usage rate of the building. The design firm that EMU has hired to design the renovation said that they had hoped to find under-utilized space in the building, but that there basically was no such space.
A week or so after the advisory committee passed this motion, word came back from the Provost’s office, thru its associate Wade Tornquist (who’s also an associate dean in arts and sciences) that it was impossible for the University to find space to relocate any seizable number of offices from PH. Consequently, according to Wade, relaying what he said was the judgment of the provost and upper administration, the planning for PH’s renovation must be premised on it retaining all the programs, staff and depts. it now houses.
(Around this time, it was also agreed that perhaps the deans’ offices could be relocated, but that won’t add much space, and it’s all interior space; dividing it up into cramped sunless offices excited no one aside from the design firm, as far as I can tell. And a lot of people figure moving the deans offices away from an academic building is not a good idea, in terms of function and communication and the tendency of EMU administrators to become isolated from the real campus).
So, the PH Advisory Committees took our mandate from Wade and the Provost office, and proceeded to try to find viable ways to seriously improve the educational value of this immense, badly designed, incredibly crowded building without reducing its over-utilized nature to any extend. Nobody was happy about this, but nobody advocated fighting for what we were told was impossible.
Why is this long story relevant? Turns out that in King Hall there are approximately 43 currently empty offices, in move-in condition, suitable for faculty uses. They have been empty since the summer of 2007, when Career Services left King hall for McKinney. There are at present no plans on what should be done with these offices. The building has a good elevator, and nice woodwork, and quite a bit of charm — and EMU has been heating these empty offices every winter. They were empty, heated, and in all meaningful senses of the word, “available” a few months ago, when the PH Advisory Committee was told it was impossible to find any spaces for any body to move to from PH.
A few months ago, university officials replied to a sincere request that the university explore ways of reducing the crowding in PH by saying “It’s impossible, no alternatives exist.” Management blew off the the very real needs of the staff, faculty and students of PH. Either those officials were lying, or they are incompetent.
Meaningful planning involves looking at all needs and all available resources, and devising ways to optimally match the two. What university need is served by keeping forty offices empty for two years, and by hiding the fact that they exist from an official university advisory committee? The existence of the empty King hall offices was discovered by a subcommittee of the PH Advisory COmmittee, and a tour of those and other spaces was conducted a couple of weeks ago. I commend the members of that committee for making this information available.
How much is 43 offices? Enough to relocate nearly any PH department (English being the exception, since it is such a large department – larger than one whole college at EMU). Or, instead of relocating an entire department, it could house large parts of two or more departments. Exactly what should be done with them would require — radical idea here! – discussion, analysis, and planning. The responsible officials short-changed the university by stopping such discussions not only a few months ago, but also two years ago, when the King hall space was emptied and PH was just as unbearably crowded as it is now.
Who’s accountable?
I think Mark is right, but beyond that, I guess one of the other problems/regrets I have about this process so far is a real inability to think outside of the box, literally. We have these empty dorms kitty-corner from Pray-Harrold that have something like 300 rooms in them. If there had been some way of proposing to re-purpose these dorms as office space when the PH project first went in for funding, we might have been able to both increase office space and classroom space, two very real needs. But because we didn’t do that in the proposal, we’re not going to really see that much of an increase in office space or classroom space, and we will probably have those dorms empty for another 10 years at least.