Misguided Priorities

g on Jordan Avenue is truly magnificent. Its sleek design with special acoustic engineering, enormous LCD televisions and baby grand pianos in every room make it a sight to behold.

The result of a $44 million grant from the Lilly Foundation, the 85,000 square foot edifice is home to more than 84 rooms that serve largely as faculty studios, with several reserved for percussion practice.

Though an impressive and celebrated addition to both the Jacobs School of Music and the campus as a whole, the new building embodies our school’s recent adoption of an ultimately harmful “if you build it, they will come” mentality.

There has been a consistent demand for more student practice space for years.
The space made available to us is dingy, covered in graffiti, windowless and bathed in harsh yellow light from flickering fluorescent overheads.

The pianos are weathered and chronically out of tune, with once-white keys browning and cracking with age.

“Andy Was Here” is scratched into the flaking wall paint, and the wobbly heads of music stands flop over in defeat at the slightest provocation of an orchestral excerpt.
Although our esteemed faculty has every right to ditch the annex for their swanky new studios, it is undeniable that students were given the short end of the stick in this situation.

If IU truly cared about improving the quality of the education and lives of its students, those in charge would put endowment money toward much-needed repairs and upgrades to the well-used facilities already on campus, rather than building new ones altogether.

This idea isn’t limited simply to Jacobs, however. It is a campus-wide issue that affects most buildings from Ballantine Hall to the Student Building.

It would be great if maintenance could get my professor’s office radiator to stop banging and groaning like an experimental Tom Waits song. It would be swell to have IU Secure’s notorious issues addressed and fixed once and for all.

In the meantime, IU is constructing a massive new center for Global and International Studies. So that’s nice.

To me, these new structures, along with the much-publicized Alumni Hall renovations,
speak more to a desire to improve campus by attracting impressive people or those more likely to donate rather than optimizing facilities for greatest student benefits.

Sure, world-renowned faculty might now be easier swayed to join the Jacobs team, but we are still left to practice for them in arguably the most depressing rooms on campus.

By revamping and improving the less savory aspects of campus, IU could demonstrate its commitment to students. Right now, it inadvertently feeds into the student perception of our alma mater as a jaded, capitalist enterprise, bloated on the delicious dollars of our loans and our parents.

I’m certainly not condemning our school’s beautiful new acquisition. I am instead questioning the way in which our administration prioritizes its spending in the face of many issues that are begging to be fixed. Because, ultimately, it sends the message to us as students that we come squarely second.

­— mcaranna@indiana.edu