Editorial: Open area should be used for Bio Building renovations

The bright white snow glistens on the ground as ice on the trees hangs perilously overhead, bending and reflecting sunlight shining down through the branches.

Every step you take creates a loud “crunch” as you walk between the Tarble Arts Center and Buzzard Hall as the cold air nips at your nose.

You round the corner near the smokers’ bench and are greeted by an eyesore standing just a few yards away.

With its chain-link fence and its desolate, concrete interior, it looks like a prison courtyard.

The empty space between Klehm Hall and the Biological Sciences Building is an eyesore on an otherwise gorgeous campus.

For years, chain-link fences wreaked havoc on the North Quad, making some sidewalks inaccessible and forcing some students to walk through mud.

Once construction on the Doudna Fine Arts Center was completed, most of the fences were removed, allowing clearer paths for pedestrian traffic.

However, one set of fences was curiously left standing.

What was once a parking lot now looks like a small wasteland, remnants of the construction that choked Eastern thoroughfare for nearly five years.

In Thursday’s edition of The Daily Eastern News, it was reported that Stephen Shrake, associate director of facilities planning and management, said the space would be used as part of an extensive remodeling of the Biological Sciences Building.

It’s about time. Biological Sciences has been in desperate need of remodeling.

Temperatures in the building have been known to wreak havoc with faculty and students, from water freezing overnight in beakers to sweltering summer heat pushing faculty members to desperation.

On dennews.com, an anonymous faculty member expressed outrage at the apparent lack of motivation to renovate the Biological Sciences building, saying the project has been “buried” underneath a number of other projects that have been proposed or completed, including Doudna, Textbook Rental and the new power plant.

It seems as though the source of outrage for faculty members is the apparent attitude expressed by the administration, as if they have other priorities ahead of Biological Sciences.

If this is the case, the administration needs to fairly redistribute its budget as to benefit departments that need it most, then focus on the university as a whole.

That way, Eastern could allocate enough funds to renovate the Biological Sciences Building and would therefore allocate the proper funding needed to maintain a building that is actually conducive to learning and studying biological sciences.