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Political notes from Free Press staff writers Terri Hallenbeck, Sam Hemingway and Nancy Remsen


9.17.2007

 

Bunks vs. ballrooms

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

Comments:
UVM spent $60 million or more on the Davis Center, and what they got is a montrosity that is totally out of scale for the site, blocks the views of the mountains and lake for people walking and driving up and down Main Street, and doesn't say "Burlington" or "Vermont" in any way. It's the academic building equivalent of the big-box stores in Williston.

Of course, most UVM students now seem to come from New Jersey, so maybe the Davis Center gives them and their families what they want - a nice image of Vermont that they can have in mind as they drive their gas-guzzling SUV's up from New Jersey.

It seems like UVM is less and less the University of VERMONT, and the Davis Center just accelerates that development.
 
I like it.

It seems out of scale now, because it's new and the landscaping hasn't been done.

Things change ... Vermont changes too.
 
"Things change ... Vermont changes too."

Good luck with that thinking. Most of these so-called "native" Vermonters are pretty full of themselves, still living in the idyllic days of old, when dairy farmers ruled the roost. Just cruise 15 miles from Burlington or Montpelier and check out the abject poverty that native Vermonters conviniently choose to ignore when taking their sanctimoninous high ground. And here's a news flash. You're Europeans, just like most Americans. Abernaki's can claim to be natives, but this "I'm a sixth-generation Vermonter" crap is just that--crap.
 
"Just cruise 15 miles from Burlington or Montpelier and check out the abject poverty that native Vermonters conviniently choose to ignore when taking their sanctimoninous high ground."

This is a pretty misinformed statement. There's a lot of poverty in Burlington, too, and just because an area is rural, doesn't mean that it's poor. (And I live about 15 miles from Burlington.)

And the Davis Center has absolutely nothing to do with poverty.
 
It's better that UVM is housing students 3-to-a-room on campus rather than washing their hands of the whole situation and dumping their students in apartments in Burlington neighborhoods.
 
Eeesh. Where did that ugly "native" Vermonters comment come from? I happen to have been born here, but I don't think I deserve that slam, especially since none of us know where the prior commenter happened to have been born. As far as I'm concerned, some of those taking the "sanctimonious high ground" aren't the agrarian-based, poverty-stricken, just-happened-to-have-born-here variety (who more likely have left for $greener$ pastures), but Frank Bryan wannabes who happen to worry too much over these sort of things. Change is good, and economically we are much better off than we were before the construction of I-89.

For the record, I'm a seventh-generation happened-to-have-born-here person who can also trace lineage to the formation of Sandwich, MA after Great-10x grand dad got off the good ship Abigail in 1635. Go back a couple of hundred years and the family line is "native" to south central England. That's not crap to me, it's heritage, of which I'm proud, just like you are proud of yours. How about we agree that the esteemed title of "Vermonter" is bestowed upon and includes everyone who lives here now, has lived here before, and plans to live here some time in the near future? Honorary Mention to anyone on the planet that would like to thumb their nose at Bill O'Reilly. That works for me, anyway. Seriously. As a state, it's about time we get over ourselves a little, don't you think?

On anyone's claim to authority over academic architecture are right: no one's heritage provides qualification or license to speak negatively about, of all things, a new student center at UVM. Hey, Norwich University has one, too, right on the main drag in little ol' Northfield, VT, and no one is crying about that. As an observer, its architecture seems befitting to an engineering school and I happen to like it as I drive by twice a day, but it does block the view of more historic buildings. Such is life -- I might have to actually get out of my car and walk around one piece of architecture to enjoy the view of another. As for the Davis Center, my bet is that whatever view is lost from the vantage of one's windshield on Main Street is gained from inside the building -- perhaps the complainers might go check it out?

Terri, I'm with you on the triples, as I spent my freshman year at UVM in one at the off campus Jean-Mance building. Nothing awful about the experience, but you are right about the lost opportunity from tight quarters -- I lost touch of two otherwise really great Jersey boys the minute I left J-M that May.

Sincerely Yours,

Nate Freeman
 
I don't know of many "natives" that would thumb their nose at O'Reilly. But I guess a lot of "Vermonters" are so far left now even exposing the terrible child-predator epidemic in Vermont rather than covering it up is a bad thing. Let's just keep Bill Lippert and pals in office and see how many more "Bradfords" we will get.
 
Bubba,
I don't know many native who would put up with a loud mouth like O'Reilly and I know a lot of native Vermonters ... heck, I am one!
 
"Child predator epidemic in Vermont"?

You're paranoid and insane.
 
......or Fairfax's.
 
Support you statement that there is a "child predator epidemic in Vermont."
 
....or Island Pond.
 
....and now even in state offices by "workers" employed by Office of Child Support! How nice the state can facilitate these perverts.
 
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