K-Mart? You’re kidding, right?

By Andrew Mell

Western Herald
You’ve got to be kidding right?

Reports have been swirling lately that WMU is considering moving the archives out of East Hall and into the newly vacant K-Mart building on Stadium Drive. The day when a major academic institution trying to compete with the likes of the University of Michigan and Michigan State University moves part of itself into a strip mall is a very sad one indeed.

This proposal is completely ludicrous; on so many levels, in fact, that it’s hard to even know where to start.

First, the university is making its abhorrence of anything East Campus quite evident. For years students, alumni, and area residents have been begging for the revitalization of the campus, only for their demands to fall on deaf ears.

Students should make a trip across Howard Street to the Campus Pointe Mall and into Pop’s Italian Beef. On one of the walls hangs a portrait of East hall in its prime. The building rises above Kalamazoo with a freshly manicured, sharply sloping front lawn, as a beacon of higher education and the symbol of a prestigious university.

Now it lies in ruin, not unlike many of the abandoned buildings that adorn the cityscape of Detroit. Kalamazoo is not Rome, and with ambitions for advancement, having such a ruin will not advance WMU’s position.

Administrators say that it would be too expensive, they say that East Campus is too far removed from main (West) campus. Distance didn’t seem to bother the university when it built the College of Health and Human Services on East Campus in 2005, or the College of Engineering that is completely across town, or the College of Aviation that isn’t even in the same county.

And, expense certainly was not an issue for the CHHS project or for the construction of the Chemistry Building, the College of Engineering, the remodeling of Kohrman, Brown, and soon to be Sangren; nor the upcoming construction of brand new apartments all across campus. University administration is trying to put a disclaimer on the K-Mart idea, saying that the move would only be temporary.

The only problem with that is that the moving of the archives into East Hall was also temporary when it was done in the early 1990s.

Twenty years is anything but temporary. Would students really be excited to enroll at a university that utilizes abandoned K-Mart buildings for decades and decades?

If the archives absolutely must be moved, one might theorize that McCracken Hall would be a good temporary home for them, but it’s possible that the underutilized building might soon become home to some of the displaced offices and classes while Sangren is remodeled.

The university’s explanation that East Hall is really not fit to house the many documents is a reasonable one. The building, allowed to decompose before our eyes, is undoubtedly drafty, moldy, and anything but waterproof. But whose fault is that?

The fact of the matter is that the archives contain very important documents about the history of the university and community and must be kept in a safe location that will prevent them from becoming damaged.

East Hall is surely ill equipped to handle this responsibility, but university employees have managed to make it work for the past twenty years and should continue to do so until the university can come up with an alternative that is socially acceptable.

To be blunt, moving any part of WMU into an abandoned K-Mart store is trashy.

K-Mart is already well on its way to solidifying its reputation as being a second rate store and moving into a location abandoned by the company would do nothing short of establishing WMU as a second rate university.

For an academic institution that has lofty plans, is trying to go places, and cherishes its status as one of America’s top research universities, moving into a K-Mart store is detrimental. Hopefully, WMU’s top brass will realize their foolhardiness and come up with a more socially acceptable alternative.

If they are unable to do that, giving Central Michigan University more ammunition to make fun of us will be the least of our worries.
Andrew Mell, a Western Herald opinion columnist, is a senior majoring in aviation, and can be reached via e-mail at melltimejr@hotmail.com.

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Posted by heraldstaff on Feb 21 2010. Filed under Opinion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry

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