INTRODUCTION:
Esteemed administrators and faculty, fellow students, and members of the Baruch community, I’d like to thank you all for this opportunity to discuss our vision. Before we began, I’d like to ask you to close your eyes: Imagine an open area, with plenty of greens, a few benches, perhaps even some walkways and flowers for reflection. On one end a small group is testing the power of the wind with a small apparatus constructed in a physical science class. Standing on a bench a young man practices a public speech. Two women gather footage for a campaign proposal for the city parks. In the center a large group pours over the great works of Shakespeare. Here is a community of scholars, coming together for the common purpose of knowledge, progress, and innovation. Their conversations and debates extend beyond the class time and into their social and their everyday routines. Now open your eyes. Welcome back to Manhattan. For years, the vision we have just taken you through has been the ideal university and perhaps the standard for the liberal arts college.
We are fortunate and proud to be members of Baruch College. We do not want to be Harvard. We do not want to be UC Berkeley. We do not want to be Wesleyan. We are a superb institution with a nationally renowned business program; we are public; we are diverse; and we are CUNY. We want to be Baruch. Perhaps with the realities of Manhattan (space and high cost of living), public institution (bureaucracy and budgets) being Baruch seems totally distant than that ideal we saw with our eyes closed. With our eyes open Baruch is a commuter school, a vertical campus, with people constantly rushing to and from jobs, families, more jobs, the trains, class, internships, and committees. We are aware that the college is about to undergo some major renovations, and we have come here to say that as you consider those changes, we believe that being Baruch doesn’t have to be so distant from that ideal. We believe that building a better Baruch must involve keeping in mind not necessarily that exact image of the ideal but its underlying principle of a scholarly community that integrates the academics of the classroom and the learning of everyday life and nature. There are many ways to accomplish this goal, but we stand here today in hopes of offering a few ideas. We have targeted areas that we as students are passionate about, and we appreciate your taking these ideas into serious consideration.
Baruch College has over 17,000 students. With such a large student body on a relatively small campus, overcrowding in elevators is a common problem. What makes this problem worse, are the sluggish and outdated elevators in the Lawrence and Eris Field building. In between class times, the lines in the lobby are so outrageous that the security guards spend time having to delegate and maintain the flow of traffic. Instead of focusing on their primary responsibility of ensuring the safety and well-being of students and faculty, they must become traffic officers. This issue of overcrowding has a significant impact on the welfare of the students’ education.
Picture this: you are at the top of the stairs at the exit of the subway, feeling like you just climbed Mount Everest. The train delays were unbearable, but thankfully, you left your house early today. Your watch reads “10:50″, leaving you with 20 minutes, more than enough time, to get to your class on the 12th floor at the Lawrence and Eris Field building. So, you stroll there from the subway station, watching all the tardy people speedwalk and run to their own classes. You’re thankful you’re not one of them. You cross Lexington Avenue, take out your ID and leisurely walk through the revolving doors.To your horror, when you enter the building, you see two long lines to your left and to your right, both at least a 15 minute wait. Taking the stairs is not an option, so you sigh, withdraw to waiting on line, and accept your fate.
We are grateful to hear that money is being allotted to resolve this issue. However, we do have some suggestions on how to make the construction run smoother and to decrease the flow of traffic when the new elevators are up and running. Currently, we do not even use all of the elevators, since two of them are broken. Therefore, fixing those elevators first would not affect traffic in the lobby. Then, once renovations on those two are complete, they would be put into use and another two elevators would be worked on. This pattern would go on until all the elevators are fixed, having never decreased the number of elevators available.
Once all of the elevators are up and running, Baruch could consider implementing express elevators. The use of express elevators in the Field Building will improve the flow of traffic in the elevators. For example, of the six elevators in the building, two can make stops to all of the floors in the building, another two can make stops between floors two and eight, and the remaining two can run express from the lobby and make stops between floors nine through sixteen.
Dorm life has been a quintessential trademark of the college life for a long time. The dorms encourage students to make friends, to be more independent, and to be more productive by living together under one roof. The principle purpose of dorms is to create a sense of having a second house with a feeling of closeness. The location of the Baruch dorms becomes a huge barrier to this ideal. The college is located on 23rd street and Lexington, while the dorms are all the way on 97th street and 3rd, 70 blocks away, which equates to a half hour commute if the students are lucky. Often students aren’t so fortunate, and the 6 train is either delayed or has planned work twenty-three percent of the time. There is also the issue that students have to pay around $800 dollars a year for subway costs, while already paying around $12,000 for room and board.
A logical solution to this distance dilemma is to emulate the City College of New York and implement a shuttle bus service. While a shuttle bus service won’t physically make the dorms and college closer, it will create a feeling of closeness. Maybe one day the CUNY system will do a major reorganization of their dorm system and switch the Baruch dorms with the Hunter dorms that are located near Baruch, thus making each place of residence closer to its respective college. However, right now what a shuttle bus service will allow the students to do, is to travel to and from school in an easy fashion.
Of course, simply stating that shuttle buses should be implemented fails to take into account the actual method of doing so. The financial burden it would take must be taken into consideration. The shuttle bus service, would run three times in the morning and three times in the evening. We propose that each student who dorms could pay approximately $500 more a year to cover for most of the cost, including the cost of the buses, bus driver salaries, and cost of gas. Dormers already have to pay around $800 a year for subway fare, so paying the $500 would actually save them money, along with creating a genuine dorming experience.
(TRANSITION NEEDED) Living in New York City has its advantages and disadvantages. Unfortunately, the students of Baruch will never truly have the full dorming experience due to the city’s limits. The Baruch administration can bring the students of the dorms closer to that experience by making the college campus feel like home. Facilitating the feeling of closeness is possible with the shuttle bus service, and if the administration is willing to work with students, Baruch will be able to provide its dorming population the full college experience.
Another important issue that needs to be addressed at Baruch is the lack of on-campus greenery. Aside from the few trees lining the block, there isn’t a sufficient amount of greenery in or around the Baruch campus. Not only does greenery provide a pleasant atmosphere, it also has many practical benefits.
The advantages that greenery can provide to students are aplenty. Studies such as the one done by the organization, Classroom in Nature, revealed that learning outdoors increased students’ cognitive and comprehension abilities through utilizing their senses, such as sight and hearing. The outdoor environment also created a stronger bond between students and teachers due to the more practical conversations, which changed the students’ perspectives of their teachers. Furthermore, the students were more engaged when they weren’t confined by the classroom. If we were to employ this, we would create a more productive learning environment for all students at Baruch College.
The benefits do not end at providing a more productive learning environment. In fact, a study done by mental health experts at the University of Exeter Medical School showed that greenery can significantly lower stress levels and improve mental health in the long run. For example, researchers found that as people moved to neighborhoods with more greenery, their mental health was enhanced. Think of the impact this can have on the Baruch community. By incorporating greenery into the Baruch campus, we can improve the mental health of our student body.
One way to incorporate greenery is to plant trees around the campus. This could have a major impact on students during times of high stress, like finals week. We can look to City College, another CUNY school in Manhattan, for a model of incorporating greenery.In fact, we could even bring in some people from “Million Trees NYC,” a volunteer program dedicated to planting 1 million trees in NYC, to come down to 23rd and Lexington Avenue and help create a greener campus. We acknowledge that Baruch has limited campus space, nowhere near as much as CCNY’s 35 acres, but there are always alternatives such as bringing in pots of flowers that we can consider.
Other alternatives include having a green room in Baruch and having a green roof top. Much like the New York Botanical Garden, we can have a room dedicated to greenery with various types of plants. This room doesn’t have to be very large, it just has to be a place for students to relax and experience nature. If that idea isn’t appealing, another plausible alternative would be to have a roof-top garden on the roof of either the Mason Hall building or the Vertical Campus. Adding this would not require any rearrangement, it would only require a small renovation of the roof. We can always look to CCNY as an example for this project as the school has been working on designing a new building that integrates ample green space and even includes a green-roof.
Professional organizations and groups aren’t the only places we can look to for help. Aid can come from student organizations, student clubs, or students that simply want to contribute to increasing greenery on the campus. A suggestion of a method to get students involved is to offer them community service hours in exchange for their time and effort.
Our choices aren’t limited. Even in the busy city of New York City, there are various ways to approach incorporating greenery into the campus and funding the projects. The cost of any projects to add more greenery to the campus should not prevent Baruch from taking action for what is important- improving the lives of the students. A change in scenery can benefit the mental health of students and faculty as well as help increase productivity among the student body.
CONCLUSION:
We leave here in hopes of change. We hope you will keep our speech in mind as you consider how to make this school—our school—even better. It is time to renovate, build community, and increase access, to make Baruch home- everybody’s home. We could say it’s impossible to make such an ideal vision of a campus community at Baruch, but we know that the impossible is only a series of smaller possibles. Before the renovations of the Newman Vertical Campus, think how many said it was impossible for Baruch to secure a place as a graduating four year institution let alone a prominent place in the lower east side skyline. But now Baruch is in the sky and student loyalty has sky rocketed, with the first year student retention rate currently standing at 91%. If the same is done for the Lawrence and Eris Building, we think Baruch could soar. We can achieve these changes; if we did it once- we can do it again. For the students. For us. For Baruch.
