See if these ideas make the grade:
Another year, another horde of displaced freshmen packed into UA residence halls. This year’s Residence Life waiting list contains more than 800 students waiting for permanent rooms in the dorms, leaving many camping out in repurposed study lounges or cozying up for the night with their resident assistant. It’s hard enough to adjust to the wide world of college without having to deal with the uncertainty of transient housing. Sure, Residence Life has done a commendable job making the wait as comfortable and tolerable as possible for students, and its long-term plans to expand student housing will ease the annual dorm disaster, but there’s no excuse for welcoming new students to the university and notifying them that they have no permanent home. For an inadequate response to a perennial problem, Residence Life gets (another) Fail.
This week, former Wildcat basketball star Richard Jefferson made an unexpected $3.5 million donation toward the construction of a basketball and volleyball practice facility, to provide space to teams training in the already squeezed McKale Center. The biggest gift ever made by a student athlete to his alma mater, Jefferson’s audacious donation is a powerful example of the easily overlooked economic benefits of our expensive athletics programs. Jefferson’s gift is also a humbling lesson in personal leadership and generosity to other sports stars. He may have signed a $78 million NBA contract (and he may see his name on the brand new building), but millions of dollars is still no chump change. For giving back to UA, Richard Jefferson gets a resounding Pass.
Of course, no good deed deserves to go unpunished. Now that Jefferson’s generosity has unexpectedly freed up a few million dollars, we expect to see some of it applied beyond the exorbitant world of campus athletics. We understand that the practice facility is funded by donations, but we’re still waiting to see similar munificence in the academic realm. Until the effects of the donation trickle down to the average Wildcat, the UA administration (and its budget) get an Incomplete.
After unexpectedly lackluster attendance at last year’s men’s basketball games, this year’s revamped Zona Zoo student sports pass responds admirably to demonstrated demand. Offering students the choice of two differently priced ticket packages, the new Zona Zoo is the cheapest student pass in the Pac-10. This stuff is ECON 101: lowering the price of basketball tickets should encourage more students to pack the stands. For offering students more choice and responding to market forces, Zona Zoo gets a Pass.
Students driving back to Tucson this week may have been greeted by an unexpected surprise: scores of exits closed along Interstate 10 as part of a project to expand the widely used freeway corridor. Get used to it: the construction won’t be completed until 2010 at the earliest. For giving out-of-state students a nasty back-to-school welcome, the boneheaded I-10 expansion project gets a Fail.
OPINIONS BOARD
Editorials are determined by the Wildcat opinions board and written by one of its members. They are Allison Hornick, Sarah Keeler, Connor Mendenhall, Allison Dumka, Justyn Dillingham and Jerry Simmons.
