Diamondback Online - The University of Maryland's Independent Daily Student Newspaper

Issue date: 3/27/08 Section: Opinion

"He began to wish he had taken a little more brandy." - Greene's The Power and the Glory
If there's anything we've learned from our record-shattering $620 million in outstanding maintenance bills, it's the enormous good that can come from ignoring upkeep costs and dumping funds into constructing new buildings. Never mind that it would take decades to catch up on all the repairs we've been neglecting; the new Kim Engineering Building looks so splendid. Who cares about sound infrastructure when we can have plasma televisions lining the walls of newly polished granite lobbies?

Only with ribbon-cutting ceremonies can we get smiling politicians to the campus to meet with university administrators to admire "progress." Forget trying to retain our accomplished faculty by maintaining the laboratories that house their equipment.

As long as the brick facades of the buildings lining McKeldin Mall remain august and alluring for families at Maryland Day, we needn't think twice about their functionality. As long as we have bigger, nicer, newer buildings with that ever-so-careful mix of the new, in their glass and metal, with the old, in their brick and mortar, to fill the glossy pages of our brochures, we'll have no trouble at all with student enrollment and alumni donations.

None will have second thoughts upon arrival, when taking their math placement exams in the dim bowels of the Mathematics Building. None will complain when pipes burst during the winter and drench the dorms. None will ever notice that we historically spend less than half of what we're supposed to be spending annually on facility maintenance, and our buildings are becoming less and less safe.

Sometimes, when we're lucky, our negligence even creates new on-campus attractions. Raise your hand if you remember when a busted pipe converted Hornbake Library into a fortress with a moat!

We'd miss those campus oddities a lot more than we miss the faculty who leave us for properly maintained facilities at other schools, or the enthusiasm of graduate students who lose years of dissertation work when their laboratories are flooded, or the life that is lost when the safety violations finally collapse into chaotic catastrophe.

POLICY:The signed letters, columns and cartoon represent only the opinions of the authors. The staff editorial represents the opinion of The Diamondback's editorial board and is the responsibility of the editor in chief.

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