Construction, a nuisance to students
As a student and a local to Auburn, I find myself getting more and more perturbed by the construction that the university and the city have been doing. Most recently, it’s been the university more so than the city.
The most recent construction done by Auburn started this week. The concourse, our main walkway to almost every building on campus has officially been closed for a month. While they did take into consideration, the students, faculty in staff by not closing the entire concourse, they did close a main portion.
There are just a few things I really can’t understand about it all. For starters, why exactly is doing construction on a main walkway when every student is enrolled in classes a good idea? The university had all summer when most of the Auburn University family was not in attendance to tear up this walkway and redo it. Doing it this past summer would have put less people out and been less of a nuisance.
Not only could this have been accomplished in the summer, it definitely doesn’t need to be done during football season. Every home weekend Auburn has 80,000 plus fans in the Auburn area. The concourse is used during this time. While the university says that this project will be completed in a month, before the next home football game, how often do those deadlines actually happen? It’s construction, there are plenty of things that could go wrong and the time is actually only an estimation anyway.
Getting to the bookstore from the concourse is now a maze. Going from Thach to the Quad is now longer. There are no straight lines between two places; every route is now skewed a little. Some of us have 10 minutes to get from one side of campus to the next, the concourse made this much easier to accomplish, but now getting from one side to the other is close to impossible.
Not only have they torn up our concourse, they have also displaced my department, The Department of Communication and Journalism. Our teachers all have tiny offices with no windows in the basement of Haley. Our classes are randomly placed around Haley Center with no real order. Tichenor Hall, while getting an awesome and much needed renovation, was our house. We now have no house, no structure and no order.
I think that the concourse revamp is most disturbing because of our previous displacement from Tichenor. None of the students asked to be displaced and now we are even more displaced by not being able to enter one of Haley Center’s entrances. Getting to our classes is more difficult. Noise levels are annoyingly loud in quadrants one and two making class time less productive and learning much harder.
I fully understand that Auburn does not do all of this construction to be an annoyance to all of their students. I know that this construction is being done to further beautify Auburn and the campus, but it seems as if they decided to tackle every construction project in a way that would affect the most people. I wish that maybe once in a while the students would be asked what we think. Maybe we should have an opinion since we are the people most affected.