Inside the John E. Jaqua Academic Center

According to today’s Daily Emerald, the new John E. Jaqua Academic Center (at the corner of Agate and Franklin) will now take up 103 extra parking spaces (61 behind Knight Law, 32 on Franklin & Walnut and 10 on 13th St. in front of the building) on the South end of campus.

We all know that the parking passes bought by students are a huge rip off. It is generally held knowledge that the DPS sells more parking passes to students than there are parking spaces available. How many? I could not verify that because when I placed a call to DPS as a member of a student magazine, the receptionist told me, “That’s not just information we give out”. Why that’s not public information, I have no idea.

The decrease of parking spaces available to students will only further put pressure on the University to finally (which they will eventually do) build a real parking garage that students can park in full-time. Also, the decrease in parking spaces may end up factoring into the fight over the funding of LTD.

What it really comes down to is this University’s willingness to forfeit any notion of student equality for the sake of a BCS bid and some new “kicks”. Indeed, the Emerald article pointed out that one of the conditions of Phil Knight donating the money for the Jaqua Center was that the parking spaces also be cleared for athletes use.

If the University keeps this up, they are going to have a formidable student outcry to go alongside the already rather vocal faculty opinion.

Tread lightly, Dick.

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 7th, 2010 at 14:42 by D and is filed under Campus. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.