MSU in Edina

MSU is opening up a facility at 7700 France in Edina to better serve people in the Southwest Twin Cities Metro area. It's kind of a formalization of the partnership they already have with Normandale Community College up in the Cities- but it's also an interesting move on MSU's part, I think.

I never really sat down to think about the challenges of expansion in a Division II school- I came up from Division I at Iowa, where everything is big and enormous and the hospital eats up acres of campus space every other year- but the situation would have to be different when you're dealing with a smaller school. A lot of people commute down to Mankato to take classes at MSU- and more than a few professors go the other way to teach at Normandale or even live in the Cities, so if a significant chunk of your students come from the SW Metro, why not open up a facility up there?

It's remarkable forward thinking for MSU. I have to admit a certain amount of irritation with the school over the course of my time here. Graduate Students are almost an afterthought, in many respects: we tried to start a 'Grad Society' type of thing with an eye for future unionization, but it didn't really get off the ground. The fact that most MA programs are two year programs, by the time grads meet, get organized and get things moving, they'll be about done with their degrees. But there were common complaints when we got together: assistantships are apportioned on the basis of who you know in many cases- departments are halving assistantships in the name of getting more people assistantships- but the workload stays the same. Half the money for the same amount of work. It's kind of a crock.

Then there was the Interior Design Program (this is Ali's rant of choice) it was, for some weird reason stuck under Construction Management. Which was weird enough and probably doomed the program. Interior Design is more an offshot of art than construction- but what was really ass-backwards was that the program was growing. By the time Ali had wrapped up her degree it was up to 250 students or so- and they still shut it down.

At the same time they were doing this, of course, they were pushing a 14 million dollar rec proposal to renovate fields. Fields. They needed, I believe, a soccer and a lacrosse field- leaving me to wonder why they couldn't just have had one field between them.

So yeah, there's a lot backwardness at MSU, in my mind. But this seems pretty sensible.