Had the occasion recently to take a spin around the new Davis Center at the University of Vermont — the rather sizable building still being completed along Main Street that is the college’s new student center.

If you think it looks big on the outside, it doesn’t feel any smaller on the inside. It seems like there’s always one more flight of stairs going to one more floor. There are more ballrooms than Cinderella ever could have dreamed. UVM went from having a handful of places where people could gather for meetings to having more than I suspect the United Nations has.

The goal of the new student center is to have a place where students might actually convene, thus enhancing the college experience. I am a big fan of the old Billings Student Center for the architecture of the old building (minus the antiseptic newer part that was glommed onto it), but Billings geographically just didn’t work as a student center. It wasn’t at the center of anything. A good many students could have gone through four years of school without a reason for going there.

The Davis building seems, at least so far, to have solved that problem. It is in the middle of things. There are lots of reasons a student might go there, from buying books to buying a cup of coffee, to just stopping on the way to somewhere else.

OK, so that’s one of UVM’s outstanding campus-life hang-ups perhaps put to bed.

There’s another one, though, that’s still nagging. The UVM administration has expressed an interest in making the campus more cohesive – the kind of place where you’d want to spend time living and studying and making the kind of amazing human connections that college fosters. The Davis Center was supposed to be one step toward that, and so were the new dorms that have popped up in the last couple years.

And yet, this year we read that UVM is back to tripling students up in dorm rooms built for two. Now, you can argue that there are plenty worse things in life than living in a room with two other people. Students in many countries in Africa would seize such a living arrangement. But if UVM is looking to compete with other U.S. colleges on the notion of creating a great college experience, triples are not the way to go.

I was in a triple my sophomore year at UVM a couple of decades ago. We did it sort of "voluntarily." If we doubled up, the college couldn’t guarantee us a room at all the next year. It was based on a lottery and my roommate and I had bad lottery numbers, so we decided to triple up, which leapfrogged us ahead in the lottery. Nothing calamitous happened in our triple – no knockdown, dragout fights – but nothing particularly good came from it either. None of those friendships survived the year. One roommate left UVM at the end of the year. I considered leaving too, but ended up choosing to do a semester in Washington, then came back to UVM. Living in a triple did nothing to foster the kind of campus experience that UVM seems to be looking for.

The Davis Center might be one step, but it won’t take UVM all the way. Unless those kids could bunk in a ballroom.

- Terri Hallenbeck