Dream List
With another batch of students set to graduate next weekend, alumni-to-be will find themselves looking back on their college experience in Mount Pleasant.
While people find themselves in a reflective mood these next few days, we’d like to share our dream list of things we’d like to see happen at CMU. If we were in charge of the university, here’s what it might look like:
- Classes at 8 a.m. in the morning would be a thing of the past. If prestigious Duke University has eliminated classes that start at this ungodly hour, why shouldn’t CMU allow its students to catch a few extra hours of sleep? In fact, we would nix Friday classes, too.
- CMU students would mobilize as a political force and protest incessant increases in tuition. Likewise, student turnout in the presidential election this year would be at least 90 percent. Political science professors would give extra credit to students who can prove that they vote.
- After paying — or, for most of students, borrowing — thousands of dollars in tuition, fees and other miscellaneous expenditures to get a degree at CMU, students would not have to pay a $35 application fee for graduation.
- Someone would figure out (and correct) the reason why retention rates for black, Hispanic and American Indian students aren’t as high as those of white students at the university.
- CMU’s Board of Trustees wouldn’t hammer out the university’s budget in private before giving it the rubber stamp in “open session.”
- We would ask Democratic Gov. Jennifer Granholm to appoint new members to CMU’s board that reflect the racial and gender composition of the university’s student population. These new members also would understand the necessity and virtue of Michigan’s Open Meetings Act.
- The woman’s field hockey team would have a place to play at CMU. And an athletics fee for incoming freshmen and transfer students wouldn’t be needed to pay for the new facility. We would force the athletics department to stop raising money for the new events center until it raised enough money for field hockey.
- Good non-tenured professors, such as journalism Assistant Professor David Weinstock, wouldn’t be shown the door.
- CMU officials would explain to the campus community how to properly use the painted white lines on the sidewalk between the Charles V. Park Library and Moore Hall.
- Better entertainment acts than Lance Bass from *NSync would come to perform on campus. We would ask the Saginaw Chippewa Indian Tribe to share some of its acts slated to perform at the Soaring Eagle Casino and Resort.
- University officials would have to secure all of its commencement speakers in advance instead of a week before graduation.
