Don't Let CVCBD Screw up Charles Village
Imagine your school was engaging in a massive redevelopment project. Currently the school doesn't offer much in terms of a local commercial presence, but a new complex promises to change all that. Erected just outside of your campus, the complex would feature a multistory residential complex that sat above ground-floor commercial establishments.
And imagine when you attended the ribbon cutting of this commercial enterprise, the stores that had been brought to campus were a Kinkos, XandO's, Record and Tape Traders, Blimpies, Ruby Tuesday's and Tenpachi. That underwhelming premise is exactly what students faced eight years ago when the Homewood Apartments opened.
The Charles Village Project has the potential to transform North Baltimore into a college town, but only if it brings in businesses that students actually want to solicit. Apologies to those concerned with the spread of faceless commercialization, but that means Starbucks, McDonalds and the Gap. That means bars, movie theaters, fast food and clothing retailers. Charles Village may never become Georgetown, but we can't risk it becoming Hopkins Square either. The school must be adamant in challenging Charles Village Community Benefits District and their shortsighted and selfish demands for wine bars and other commercial non-sequiturs.
Not just for our sake, but for the city's as well. Bringing franchised commercial options inside Baltimore means tax dollars that would go to already wealthy suburbs will instead go to the city.
Hopkins must ensure that the businesses that populate its neighborhoods will be the type that guarantee both the students and the city an exciting future.
Seize the Colltown Network
The Charles Village Project will come to define not only Charles Village, but also the college population of Baltimore. Currently, no school in the city has a traditional marketplace aimed at college students. The CVP will transform Charles Village into a commercial hub for students.
But that transformation will not occur without overcoming the significant transportation barrier that exists in Baltimore. Fortunately, the Collegetown Network, if employed properly, can solve that problem.
For years, Colltown traffic has been shuttling students North, to Towson. But recent efforts have changed that pattern, making it a priority to ship kids South, to downtown Baltimore.
This is too bad for Towson's nightlife, but lucky for Hopkins. By the time the Charles Village Project is completed, the southbound traffic pattern will have already been established. All the school has to do is guarantee that consistent nighttime stops are made by the shuttle in Charles Village on St. Paul Street.
Hopkins should do what it can now to earn good favor from Colltown later. With Towson having dropped from the network, a power vacuum already exists in the organization. By providing manpower, leadership, guidance and maybe opening our libraries up to the other schools (a measure almost every other member of the network has taken), Hopkins will be able to reap what it sows. Hopkins, Baltimore City and college students throughout the area will be the beneficiaries.
Cap admissions
Look at a handful of the problems Hopkins currently faces: no housing for upperclassmen, a large student presence off-campus that is difficult to unite and impossible to secure, a freshman class divided amongst seven residential buildings.These are all symptoms of a campus whose population has outpaced its living resources.
In the past five years, incoming freshman classes have numbered around 1,100 students. In the five years prior, that number was closer to 900. That's an extra 800 undergraduates on campus at one time with no additional housing facilities (the last residential addition was the renovation of the Homewood Apartments in 1997).
But this is only one side of Hopkins' growing pains. As the school races to catch up with its lack of beds, classes are getting larger, advising (faculty, career, academic, professional, you name it) is becoming more impersonal and less useful and our climate is becoming more competitive.
Expansion is not just an issue of engineering; it is also an issue of philosophy. Does this school want to concentrate on providing an excellent experience for the students it already has or does it want to play a numbers game, providing a meager experience for more bodies? Growth without discipline or focus, growth for its own sake, punishes students in exchange for dollars.
Lock in local properties at today's prices
Anyone with an eye to the future must realize that soon Charles Village will be better described as Hopkins Village. The school or those affiliated with it (Fraternities or the Hillel) will eventually purchase the Charles, Blackstone, Briarley, Burford and Wyndam Manor within 10 years, creating a Hopkins owned corridor across N. Charles Street, starting at the Homewood and extending to Wolman.
Charles Commons, coupled with the Struever Bros. redevelopment projects, will immediately drive local property rates up. Hopkins can either admit its long-term aspirations and aggressively buy up local property, or face protracted bidding wars with property owners who havebeen price gouging Hopkins students for years. Already, in the last year, local landlords have increased rents at unreasonable levels.
If Hopkins real estate can secure these properties, they can manage them better, offer them cheaper and make them and the surrounding community safer.
Give faculty a stake in student life...
Professors have no facilitated role in student life. Why should a professor care whether his students eat sawdust in the dining halls, sleep in shoebox dorms or have something to do on a weekend? The school tells its professors, "conduct your research, teach your classes, hold office hours and everything will be fine." Instead, they should be challenging them to care about their students and rewarding them for taking active roles on campus. The number of student organizations Hopkins has numbers in the hundreds. You could count on two hands the number of those clubs that have faculty advisors.
This is especially important because our administrators are products of a faculty culture that largely neglects the contribution it could make. Former Krieger Dean Herbert Kessler used to meet with the StuCo executive board every week. Why does that currently sound so unbelievable, when it happened less than 10 years ago?
Pairing student groups with faculty advisors is the first and easiest step the school should take. Faculty members could help flatten the immense learning curve of our decentralized, bureaucratic and Byzantine university.
Imagine if the Board of Elections, or Student Council, had the benefit of an intelligent, committed and levelheaded faculty advisor. Would we have seen the childish immaturity, poor foresight and self-centeredness that have left what are supposed to be our most important institutions flying blind?
...And Let them eat cake
As punctuated as our faculty-student interaction problem often is, a problem that gets much less attention is intra-faculty interaction. Our faculty is much less an intellectual community than it is a loosely tied network of intellectual pockets. Professors know the names of other university faculty members in their field better than they know the names of the faculty at Hopkins.
Why the distance between departments? Much like students, faculty simply do not have a place to congregate. Developing a faculty tradition at Hopkins must begin with taking the Hopkins Club out of the hands of elderly alumni and back into the hands of our professors. Faculty members need a place to congregate, dine, smoke a cigar, drink a nice brandy and bond over how terrible their students are, something to which members of any department can relate.
Give up on Levering
As the campus expands farther eastward across Charles Street, Levering Hall, already on life support, will soon be a memory for students. Plagued by poor design (the school of narrow stairways, mazelike corridors and cramped atriums was never a successful one), no amount of fireplaces and modern furniture is going to resuscitate the building.
Rather than a heart transplant, Levering should get a brain transplant. Take the housing, dining and Res life offices out of the AMRs, where they rob freshman of lounge space, and turn Levering into what it has already become, a seat of student life administration. Stop wasting resources trying to convert Levering into something it will never become, a student union.
While you're at it, transform the Gilman basement into a fully functioning student center. Already seating a Post Office and bank, the withdrawal of the bookstore will provide space to develop a one-stop destination for students. Include a small copy center, some computer kiosks, a Ticketmaster outlet, a photo lab, a newsstand, a student travel center, a pharmacy, even a hair salon. Some of these enterprises could even be student run.
iPods make students happy, bricks make them embittered
Imagine the first few weeks of a Hopkins freshman. They arrive at their cramped, expensive, sweltering dorm room in the AMRs, where they're told air conditioning is forbidden due to potential electrical overload. Interesting, as they notice the housing and dining offices all seem to have a/c units.
Their attention is later piqued when they realize they must pay exorbitant fees for internet access, cable TV and telephone service, which most of their friends at less expensive schools get for free. Hopefully they'll think better of studying their dining plan, for they might realize they're paying $8 every time they step into Terrace.
Couple this with a visit to the bookstore, which seems to have prices comparable to a BWI gift shop, and it's easy to see why Hopkins students come away feeling nickel-and-dimed. This is especially true when they read in the papers that freshmen at Duke are getting iPods while they're getting brick pathways.
Providing students a simple amenity, like free cable TV or internet access, would be worth much more to students than the extra money in their wallets. It would be a tangible representation, however superficial, that the school views them as more than a meal ticket. Hopkins could even take Duke's approach, by hiding costs for amenities in tuition. At least students could somewhat justify their tuition hikes.
Redefine the Residential Advisor
When it comes to student life, the school does a particularly poor job of utilizing its infrastructure. Lack of communication is a commonly cited problem, but those with the largest capability and access to communicate to students go completely unused.
Residential advisors are the most potent and well-connected resources student life has at their disposal. But their potential to inform students is completely overlooked. Instead, the school overloads them with administrative duties, asks them to do the impossible (the idea that $50 is enough to plan three events for 40 kids is a hallucination), and calls upon them for advice when their opinion is completely compromised by their employment.
Not to sound too Machiavellian, but the school should be employing RAs as their propaganda machines. They should make RAs the primary informers for on campus events. Hall meetings should be called much more often, becoming an outlet for RAs to inform students about social events.
While Hopkins doesn't exactly provide a vibrant social atmosphere for its students on campus, many worthwhile events do go unattended thanks to stealth publicity and an inability to reach students. Student life and student groups would both benefit from making RAs information gatekeepers. An RA giving a push for student elections might just make a world of difference in voter turnout.
Wake the campus up
All the brick and marble in the world will never make our campus seem like it has a pulse. Our campus may be beautiful and stately, but it is also completely cold.
The school's draconian postering and flyering regulations have left its exterior completely bare, absent of any signs of student presence. Other campuses have bulletin boards outside; they have kiosks and marquees, apron boards and open doors. They have fliers taped to the ground and signs hanging from balconies. They have trees that aren't surrounded by giant patches of mulch. Our school seems to prefer hiding that students attend. Take a walk on campus on almost any night of the week and you will realize that there are almost no signs that students spend their days there.
Murals that promote events should not be buried in the Gilman tunnel (though it's a start); they should be displayed proudly above ground.
And while the school is at it, they should light the Gilman Clock Tower with different colors for different events, like they used to do freshman year. Something as simple as seeing purple lights fall across the tower during the Ravens playoff run made this campus seem that much more animated.
-- Maany Peyvan is co-editor-in-chief of the Johns Hopkins News-Letter
If you're interested in writing an edition of "10 Ways to Fix Johns Hopkins," send an e-mail to features@jhunewsletter.com.
Please note All comments are eligible for publication in The News-Letter.