It’s finals week here at the University of Illinois, so campus is packed with parents hauling home the equivalent of 1/2 of one dorm room’s worth of detritus.

Moms trying to fit 3 cu. ft. fridges in the trunks of Impalas, dads sweating like hogs carrying bags of shoes and vomit stained t-shirts as their daughters stumble along, groggy either from the mass of bar-scars on the backs of their hands or finals, no one is sure. And, since the weather is so nice, the finer features of working on a college campus abound.

We’ve been taking back returned mini-hubs (and mini-switches) since Monday. 1740 items have been returned so far, but there’s still another 5400 out there. (We count the hub and the power supply as seperate items, so that’s about 2700 pairs to come in yet.) Computer labs close at 5 pm today, a few places are open for hub return tomorrow, commencement is on Sunday.

Another year gone by. Has it really been 7 years since I graduated from here?

Via this weeks’ Carnival of Education, I read a post at Number 2 Pencil. The main jist of the post is that places of higher learning shouldn’t be building new residence halls and higher tech classrooms just because the incoming students expect it.

My question is, why not? If the school has the money available, higher tech classrooms can be beneficial to the learning experience of every student that gets to use them. But the high tech classrooms part isn’t what got my hackles up, the better quality res halls is.

Guess what? I hadn’t ever shared a bathroom or a bedroom when I went to college, nor had I ever lived without central AC. Did that stop USC from putting me, an Honors College student, into an all-female dorm with hall bathrooms and no AC whatsoever? No, it did not.

Well, guess what? (At least where I work) Housing is a self supported business, meaning we have to attract and retain customers to pay the salaries of the people that work here and to continue to provide the services that we do. This means we have to compete with an ever changing, ever upgrading market of apartment complexes and smaller landlords that are going the extra mile to get students to move out of the res halls and into their properties. While we do have somewhat of a captured market with our freshman certified housing rules, there are private facilities that are in that market as well so we can’t be too complacent.

I’m not saying that every one of our residence halls should be like a penthouse suite at a Vegas casino, but don’t you think laundry facilities should be accessible without walking to some large central laundromat? Maybe air conditioning and some carpet instead of tile floors? Remember, we are trying to increase return customers here, offering these types of amenities is just one carrot out there on the end of the stick. When was the last time you saw a Studebaker or Yugo dealership? Innovate, update, evolve or get pushed out of the market.

I lived in our facilities for 4 years as an undergraduate, and I’m happy to say that, yes, I’m probably a better person for the experience, but did I really need to sweat through those 4 or 5 weeks a year that we needed AC to get the temp down? Do our incoming students need to use a networking infrastructure (the physical wiring) that was installed in the late 1980s, well before they were born?

Typical University methods. We’ve been talking, internally to Housing, about what to do with Orchard Downs for several years now, and now someone from higher up says this:

Dempsey said that a final decision about graduate housing would not be made until two to four years from now, and any decision about commercial or retail development would come after that.

Oh well, just as I like to tell everyone at work every time some major project comes up: “Don’t worry, we’ll all be retired before they even get started.”

What a quote:

and I think the neighborhood thinks the University wants 160 acres of a steel mill surrounded by strip clubs

Housing operates Orchard Downs, but we are at the University’s whim about what happens to it. The popular opinion around here is that we’ll find out it’s fate the same way as everyone else, from the newspaper.

I talk to the @#$%&*@ customers man. You know, the ones that take a loaner laptop on a trip to some far away state and need to give a presentation in 1 hour but have no idea how to log into the laptop.