There is a lot going on here

TESSA VANDERHART STAFF

“A university campus is not just so many buildings set on a piece of land, serviced by roadways and parking lots and populated by a large number of students and staff. A campus is foremost an environment created for the pursuit of knowledge, a place designed in such a way that students will be encouraged to the utmost to exchange ideas, to mingle freely and partake in all the varied activities offered both academically and socially.” — Claude de Forest, Campus Planning Study, 1964.

The University of Manitoba has been in the news lately!

Not just in the Manitoban, of course — with plans for a new soccer complex, thousands of freshly blue-printed graduates, a slough of new construction and, heck, plans to make plans to develop what is currently a 120-acre golf course, there is a lot going on at the U of M these days.

So many plans, in fact, that I wonder — is anyone looking at the big picture?

The university’s first “campus plan” was submitted in 1964 by an associate professor in the faculty of architecture. Claude de Forest set up plans for much of what would become today’s Fort Garry campus: an arts complex, and another for athletics, an independent faculty of commerce building. Even more clear-sightedly, he called for residential/mixed-use development west of University Crescent (what is now Smartpark) and in the Southwood Golf and Country Club.

In 1999, then-new university president Emöke Szathmáry’s office appointed a steering committee to “develop a Campus Plan that would guide the future growth of the Fort Garry Campus.”

So says the committee’s report, published in 2003, complete with guiding principles: community; place; complexity; diversity; accessibility; collaboration; optimization; safety; esthetic integrity; livability; and well-being. Principles not unlike Szathmáry’s “live, work, learn, play” rationale for purchasing the Southwood golf course for $10 million this week.

The University of Manitoba, its buildings, library, and furnishings are worth $2 billion; the university comprises 10.3 km of roads; 6,300 parking spaces; residence rooms for 1,160 students.

But beneath this mass of infrastructure and compendium of buzzwords, is there really a vision?

Not a vague, published, manufactured kind of vision — but rather the kind of vision you get from just looking around campus. What do you see?

The river: the university is located in a bend in the Red River; it is the U of M’s trademark. It flooded the university traumatically in 1950, and again in 1997. Last week the Winnipeg Free Press reported that homes along Riviera Crescent, a few kilometres from the university, are falling into the river. The Southwood Golf Club cites the erosion of riverfront on holes nine and 10 as a primary reason for selling the property. Much of the university’s growth over the past 73 years has been along the east-west axis of the campus though, problematically, we have now run out of land (which not even the 2003 report, idealistically, predicted would happen).

And University Centre! Only a dream in the 1964 report, it’s gone from UMSU-controlled (theoretically) to university administration-controlled (or so they think) and now appears to be swinging back in the direction of UMSU — if plans for more student control of the space move forward — replete with a new food-services deal with Aramark, worth undisclosed millions, and bake sales amid the already thumping hustle.

And the Duckworth Quadrangle! Is there a single student who doesn’t resent the “keep off the grass” signs cutting off the perfect shortcut to the centre of campus?

Construction is ongoing throughout campus — after all, it is construction season — and the new St. John’s lecture hall that will hide in the shadow of the parkade, the refurbished Princess Royal Walk courtyard (between UC and Architecture and Education), the parking-lot improvements behind Fletcher Argue, are all important developments I’m sure, and falling well into the vacuities of the campus plan’s prescriptions — these projects are simply treading water.

But: there will be a new university president next year, and she (or he) may or may not come standard with a vision. I wait for this vision with excitement and cynicism.

It’s hard, I admit, to be positive, to express a plan for the university; plans are fickle. The University of Winnipeg’s 2007-08 operating budget will crash and burn if only 200 fewer students than anticipated enroll! Changing administrations — provincial, collegiate, and student — compound this fear.

But why should we be afraid of change when there’s so much to ask and say and do?

Say: we don’t need more residence buildings to sit empty. Say: we do need campus plans that embrace the riverbank, plans that are sustainable. Say: the 1964 plans for community-building and a “magnificent river exposure” are probably worth looking into — and ask, why not?

Ask: why are some of the tunnels and the beautiful, beautiful Taché Hall auditorium are semi-permanently closed? Ask: why do we need to make a plan to make a plan for newly purchased space when we already have good but under-utilized space, thank-you-very-much!

Ask why we don’t pave over the quad to make a parking lot. Ask anything, everything, anything!

And so I ask, U of M students, faculty, alumni, visitors, community members — what is your vision for the university?

Write it in to the Manitoban! Write it in to the university! Graffiti it on walls if you have to — make this university your own. Make it a better place (or a worse one).

Welcome to 2007-08. There is a lot going on this year; I hope you’ll be a part of it.