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Around ASU: Phoenix campus offers cosmo, not college, life

drexel-christopher
Drexel

If I were just a few years younger, I would be sharing my college experience with corporate desk jockeys, cosmopolitan residents and chic shoppers searching for Manolo Blahnik shoes.

In between lectures, my day would resemble more of a "Sex and the City" episode than a day on campus. That is because the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication and KAET Channel 8 are set to relocate to a new high-rise building in Phoenix -- and I, being the journalism student I am, will be moving with it.

Though we at the Cronkite school have known of its move downtown for some time now, what we didn't know is the school will be shared with 26 floors of condominiums, 12 adjacent floors of office space and one floor of retail shopping. That's 39 combined floors of citified life, and a mere six floors -- placed in between the shops and the condos, mind you -- set aside for the Cronkite School.

It's all set to go down when the building is complete in 2008.

And you know the biggest irony of all this? A 1,230-space parking garage will be attached to the building, and students will all get to share it with residents, office workers and shoppers. It just goes to show that even if they built an additional campus in Venice, Italy, there'd still be problems with parking.

ASU has said for a long time that having the journalism program and other colleges in a city setting would mean more resources for the schools, and there's something to be said for that. But journalism students are still students, and we enjoy being a part of the college experience, too.

Going to school in a high-rise building surrounded by people that have nothing to do with the school likely will leave students feeling isolated from their peers.

Instead of strolling across Hayden Lawn to the Memorial Union to eat at Burger King, we'll be taking the elevator to Wolfgang Puck's Spago.

Instead of walking to north campus to watch the Sun Devil baseball team play, free of charge with our student IDs, we'll have to walk several blocks to Chase Field and lay down 20 bones to watch a bad Arizona Diamondbacks team.

Instead of being part of the utopia of interacting with students with a myriad of different majors, we will interact exclusively with our own kind (and nursing, public programs and University College students, if we happen to pass their buildings down the street).

There will be no tanning as we stand on grassy malls, no bike riding across campus, no midday concerts, no shows at Gammage Auditorium, no demonstrations, no exercise gained from walking to class and no diversity that comes from students focusing in all kinds of fields.

Instead of being hit up for cash by bums on Mill Avenue, we'll be hit for cash by bums on Van Buren.

You get the point.

The lone advantage, by my count, is for us State Press staffers who figuratively "live" in the newsroom -- sometimes working 20 hours in a day before passing out on a decades-old futon we think was bought from Goodwill after an elderly person died -- we can now literally live in the newsroom.

That is, if mom and dad shell out the likely hefty bill associated with the condominium a few floors up.

Christopher Drexel is a journalism senior. Reach him at drex1_phx@hotmail.com.


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