[Extra: Faner construction]

[Schadenfreude update. On May 31 a gas line was ruptured outside Faner--sending employees home from surrounding buildings.  Earlier a water line had been ruptured, cutting of the AC in the building (but that luckily happened before the recent heat wave). Who's operating that there steam-shovel, anyway? And I wonder if the contractor's insurance will pay back the university for having to give hundreds of employees paid time off work.]

Comments are closed on this post due to violations of Godwin's Law, and thanks--special thanks--to numerous other anonymous offenses against good taste, bad taste, any taste at all. For similar reasons, even before shutting comments down, I have forever deleted (ah, what absolute powers I have as blogmaster, though they are but a pale foreshadow of my administrative kingdom to come!) I have deleted, I say, a number of terribly clever personal and impersonal attacks made via abusive references to poultry--who really deserve better, don't you think? Is there a law mandating that comment threads cease and desist once we get to maladroit rhetorical bestiality of this sort? Gosh, there should be. Johnson's Law? I shall be immortal, after all.

OK, I promised only retrospective posts but this one is close to home. The Southern has a story today on the renovated "pedestrian mall" outside Faner, where I work.

Two points: the non-aesthetic reasons for this renovation given in the story are bogus. And this is a helluva lot of money: $1.25 million.

More Golden Shovels

Groundbreaking for the new student services building took place yesterday, as the Southern reported. The aim is to put an end to the Woody Shuffle. Woody Hall is not an ideal structure for its current function (it was, I believe, originally a dormitory) and this building will no doubt be more functional and more attractive.

But anyone not brand new to this blog will know that I've become reflexively critical of new infrastructure on campus. As trustee Don Lowery rather sharply pointed out in his WSIU interview some time ago, SIUC has the infrastructure to support c. 18,000 undergraduates, though only 15,000 are on campus. So our priority is infrastructure? Paid for by student fees? As if the Woody Shuffle was due to the architectural shortcomings of Woody Hall, not to poorly functioning bureaucracy; as if that bureaucracy will automatically improve just because we've put it in a new building. We've lost hundreds (sic) of civil service positions over the last few years; would you rather go to bad old Woody with enough staff or the brand spanking new building with far too few staffers?  Thanks to the state's messing with pensions, and to low campus morale, the university will face something of a mass exodus of employees in all classifications in the near future. We will soon be coming up against our contractually mandated student-Faculty ratio of 26:1 (which the administration tried to raise both during and after negotiations). The answer? New construction!