After three weeks of lounging about on the couches and easy chairs of your homes, the return to campus furniture might come as a bit of a shock. The firm chairs of the library, the wicker-basket seating of the Atrium and those beloved classroom Lay-Z-Boys - also called "desks" - are not as hiney-friendly as the seating options your parents might offer.
In short, this campus is not comfy.
McKinley Avenue has been beautified and new classroom and living spaces appear on a yearly basis, but this campus still lacks a place for students to just sit, hang out and waste time. For that reason, the Office of Student Affairs and the Student Government Association have been pushing for a "new student center" - in the form of an additional building closer to the center of campus in which various recreational facilities will be housed. Still, these planners have yet to explain how this vision of a new recreation center will avoid being the L.A. Pittenger Student Center Part Deux.
Meanwhile, the solution has been staring us in the face - when "us" is anyone who has ever been to the Atrium during lunch or dinner hours. No, the solution isn't more fast food joints; it's small alcoves of space where students can get comfortable, get noisy, relax and have a good time together - spaces like the lounge outside of Starbucks.
Between incredibly comfortable couches, various food choices nearby and multiple television screens, the space is often standing-room-only during peak meal hours. Beyond that, the students hanging out there treat the space more like a living room than an academic building - they lounge around, meet up with friends, watch all variety of television shows and sometimes even fall asleep. Often professors and student organizations feel more comfortable meeting in that environment than in cold classrooms or out-of-the-way meeting rooms. People just seem comfortable there.
It's the perfect student center - just on a smaller scale. And that's okay.
Not everything we do at Ball State University has to be "cutting-edge cool," or even bold, shiny and impressive like Sursa Hall or any of the buildings currently under construction.
In fact, Ball State could stand to conserve a few of its resources and make better use of extant buildings by finding tucked-away rooms throughout campus that can be turned into "student center" spaces. They can be refurnished with appealing and comfortable - rather than institutional - furniture, outfitted with reliable wireless Internet access and other entertainment features like televisions or video games and maybe even modified to offer snack food options like cold sandwiches or drinks. In all likelihood, even dramatic changes as such would be vastly cheaper than building any new structure, and buying higher-end furniture would not be a waste since it would be an investment in the needs of the student body.
Picture it: One space could be decorated in modern art for one crowd, and another could have the feel of a jazzy coffee shop or your parent's homey family room. With our increasingly sectarian society, it only makes sense to offer multiple student lounges, each with their own personality, to suit the needs of various student groups. Furthermore, by distributing student spaces throughout campus, they'd be more accessible to everyone and available for a wider variety of activities - including a possible solution to the cracking down of holding meetings for clubs and organizations in residence halls. Plus, the L.A. Pittenger Student Center would still be available for large events, like Late Nite.
While this plan might not be the perfect student center solution, the fact remains that the university is quickly running out of space for new buildings and that financial support is not a bottomless well.
As talks about a new student center continue this semester, considering the possibilities of modifying and improving the space we already have would be a logical move.
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