Following Alice Down the Rabbit-Hole

I went to campus last week; it was quite possibly the first time in a year that I'd set foot on the main campus.

What a difference a year makes.

I've spent the last week internally processing a series of contradictions that became obvious after my visit. On the one hand, I've been stranded at the satellite campus in the middle of nowhere, a place where we don't own the land, (we currently do not even have a signed lease for the land I hear) and the computer network is of sub-third-world status. But the main campus has shiny new buildings with construction taking place for even more -- new dorms, new parking structures -- despite the fact that the state that owns us is bankrupt.

How is it that we blithely go on with new construction projects despite facing massive budget cuts? How can we begin to afford to construct classrooms on land we don't own that we plan to introduce to the wrecking ball in a year or three? So that we can go lease even more expensive land in the midst of a budgetary downward spiral?

I should mention the good news: Engineering finally has running water, something the 5-building complex did not have for the better part of the last semester. Yupp. That's right. No hot or cold running water, no toilets, and, probably also no fire sprinklers either. I hear they went without electricity for a week as well.

And at least they presumably now have hot running water, something my building has never had, which made the Swine Flu posters in the restrooms all the more ironic as they advised people to wash their hands with warm water for 20 seconds or more. To do that, we'd have to microwave it. Given the managerial calls for cutbacks on electricity usage (such that last semester my department's office clocked in at something like 50-odd degrees), I'm betting that those microwaves are likely to become as contraband as the surreptitiously-used space heaters have become.

My mind keeps coming back to the shiny new buildings and new construction in the midst of a system that seems to be collapsing on itself. How is this even conscionable when we've got buildings without hot water, without running water, without electricity, with computer networks that would embarrass a developing nation?