If you had $10 million to spend on campus improvements, how would you use it?
Samantha Goldstein has a simple answer to that question, part of the 2008 Undergraduate Budget Priorities Committee web survey.
“I would tear down Norris and rebuild it,” Goldstein said. “It’s a poor student center. It’s more administration-friendly than student-friendly.”
The Weinberg senior said she answered the question, although not precisely that way on the survey, which went online earlier this week.
The survey is designed to collect student opinions for the committee’s presentation to Northwestern’s budget committee later this month.
The current survey asks students to rank four initiatives in order of preference. In addition, there are two questions about printer use, a yes/no on whether the flyers on the ground should be replaced with informational monitors and of course, the final $10-million question.
This year’s format has changed considerably from previous years, when students were asked to simply allocate a set number of points between 15 to 20 different options. Students could give one option all the points or divide them based on their preference.
UBPC chairwoman Jessica Wash said the new system was created because proposals on the list could be wildly different and cost varying amounts of money.
“You could have things like expanding Wi-Fi coverage over the entire campus and leaving the dining hall open later,” the Weinberg senior said. “It would be better just to ask about some things that cost the same amount.”
Wash said the addition of the questions about printer information were an attempt to better flesh out a specific proposal about expanding free printing on campus.
“It gives us a lot more information about how students actually use it, which will help us make our case,” she said.
The items on the list were selected through a process that included an open selection period in November and UBPC deliberations to decide which ASG proposals for university funding should be put up for public review.
UBPC committee member Aneesa Arshad said the question about replacing flyers came from a desire to quantify the degree of support for the proposal, which ASG had brought up earlier in the quarter.
“There are all these concerns, there are environmental issues, groups complain that it takes too much time and it costs the university tens of thousands of dollars to clean,” the SESP senior said. “We just don’t know how large the sentiment to get rid of ground flyering is.”
Previous UBPC suggestions that have been approved have included keeping the library open longer and expanding the Purple Route and Purple Express shuttles.
This fall, a UBPC request from 2000, hiring a lawyer to provide legal advice to students, was eliminated due to lack of use. The idea of an intercampus shuttle and the expansion of campus Wi-Fi have both been proposed to the NU budget committee before, but were not implemented.
While all poll results are anonymous, save for the identifiers of gender, year and school, Goldstein has no problems revealing her preferences. She would like an intercampus shuttle, a renovated Norris ground floor, a 24-hour study lounge and expanded Wi-Fi, in that order.
She said she prints 21 to 50 pages a week, mostly course assignments from Blackboard, and does it from home. She said she believes that ground flyering should definitely be replaced.
“Getting people to flyer in the first place is hard,” Goldstein said. “Anything would be more humane than making people bend down to the ground over and over again.”
And of course, razing Norris to the ground.
