As it competes in the sweepstakes for America's most promising high school seniors, the University of Wisconsin knows it cannot be content to merely offer world-class professors and a humbling catalogue of fascinating courses. Today's college applicants want more, regrettably. Amid such competition, the dour catacombs of residence halls like Ogg Hall simply will not suffice. The lavish new Newell J. Smith Hall testifies to this fact. A new multipurpose high-rise will replace University Square's rubble by August 2008, and the new Microbial Sciences building is under construction, among other projects.
Our campus is swelling outward and upward, and in the process, it is losing a bit of its character.
The need for our university to grow and evolve is undeniable. The rules of the game dictate that UW offers the trendiest of residence hall amenities, the hippest cafeteria menus, and the most plush and sterile of classroom settings. To be fair, the Campus Master Plan promises many great things for this university. As the Master Plan's own website reports, the coming years will see the completion of an entirely new pedestrian mall, twining its way from Lake Mendota down to Regent Street. New buildings will replace the relics of architectural misadventure seen in Van Hise and Vilas Halls.
After these necessary improvements, however, some of the promised construction appears unnecessary and even damaging. Is the haughty-looking Grainger Hall really so ill-suited to UW's business majors that it requires a $40.5 million addition? Have donors to the School of Business seen Grainger lately? A new appendage to the most opulent building on campus is truly gilding the lily.
In the name of "more architectural harmony," the Campus Master Plan projects UW as a state-of-the-art academic hub bound together by structural consistency. This sort of connected and monolithic campus plan might be appealing in some ways, but both UW and the city of Madison stand to lose a great deal in the process. In short, such growth of the university threatens to overwhelm much of the nearby city.
Certainly this has happened before — notably in the old Greenbush neighborhood, located in the southwest corner of campus. Once the hub of Madison's bustling Italian community, much of the residential and commercial Greenbush fell victim to the expanding university in the 1960s. True, UW fulfilled its need to grow, but this came at the expense of much of the surrounding environs.
As our university continues to evolve, it is important that it does so in harmony with the surrounding city by taking care to preserve the mixture of ivory towers and urbanism that we presently enjoy. UW students reap the obvious benefits of having many of Madison's busy neighborhoods and office buildings just a stone's throw away from the pastoral lawns of the traditional university campus. The University of Wisconsin is interwoven with the city of Madison, both physically and in spirit. Indeed, the nearby neighborhoods and urban districts contribute greatly to the university's character, serving as a constant reminder that the university is part of Wisconsin's statewide "community" and that it exists first and foremost to serve its citizens.
As UW matures and grows, let us hope that it does so in a way that ensures that green space is protected and does not become yet another construction goal in the distant future. Let us hope this expansion proceeds tastefully — a campus resembling an office park would be a shame. Finally and most importantly, let us hope that as construction unfolds, the UW campus remains engaged with the city of Madison in a way that allows each to compliment the other.
Frank Hennick ([email protected]) is a senior majoring in history and international studies.
