Northwestern University and Evanston's Only Daily News Source Since 1881

The Daily Northwestern

43° Evanston, IL
Northwestern University and Evanston's Only Daily News Source Since 1881

The Daily Northwestern

Northwestern University and Evanston's Only Daily News Source Since 1881

The Daily Northwestern

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Guest Column: New student center is not the only answer to campus unity

Norris is fine just the way it is. Building a new student center is not, and should not, be at the top of the University’s priority list at this time. If we’re talking about having bad facilities, talk to ANY music major and they will give you an earful about it.

Currently the music school is split up among two buildings halfway across campus from each other, and the newer of the two buildings was built in the early 1970s. The older of the two main buildings was built in 1874 and has enough practice rooms for about one third of the students that need to use them. I’m not trying to say that the school should drop everything and build music majors new buildings, because I realize that the university undoubtedly has more important things to do than build one tenth of NU’s student population a new building (though it would be really nice… a world class music school such as Bienen deserves to have better performance spaces than Lutkin Hall. Everyone says we have Pick-Staiger, but the fact of the matter is, that students aren’t really allowed to use Pick as a performance space). I know that technically the main issue at stake here is the sense of community, and yes, Northwestern is notorious for having a poor sense of community among its undergrads, but let’s face it, there are 8,000 of us, there’s no way that it’s ever going to feel like a small liberal arts college where everyone knows everyone.

Issues with Norris are not the the sole cause of a disjointed campus. The class of 2014 in Bienen has approximately 200 students and I only know about 40 of them because the majority of music majors practice on the other side of campus and take classes on the other side of campus from me. If anything, we need to be unifying individual schools into spaces that are either close to each other (unlike Regenstein and MAB) or in one building (Tech). The fact of the matter is that since Northwestern is a mid-sized university, most students end up making their friends within their colleges and to have a school as divided and in such poor facilities as the music school is an outrage.

I realize that the goal of the New Student Center Initiative is to create a better sense of community at Northwestern, and that in and of itself is admirable; however, building a new student center will not create community among the students. What will working to unite them within their own colleges, as well as uniting them through social issues. Weinberg sophomore Ian Coley, in a comment on The Daily’s article describing the new student center initiative, calls upon the student body to instead unite by getting involved in important issues such as gay rights and Pakistan. I agree with him. Obviously it is impossible to get every student to agree on social policy and the issues that Ian has cited that are far more important than this new student center. It is important for students in this age to care about something more than themselves and their futures.

What will gain a sense of community more than a student center is uniting students to fight for something, anything that they believe in, and giving them the sense of accomplishment that they got something done that matters to them, not just by themselves, but as a whole university.

Gilbert Spencer is a Bienen freshman. He can be reached at [email protected].

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Guest Column: New student center is not the only answer to campus unity