In yet another move to expand room for the sciences on campus, Boston University has proposed building a 19-story tower at the heart of campus housing a data sciences center.
Gary Nicksa, senior vice president for operations at BU, wrote in a letter of intent that the building is intended to serve “popular and rapidly expanding areas of learning.”
If the construction projects BU invests its money in are indicative of which areas of learning are expanding on campus, it seems as though the sciences are the only areas of growth. In its construction boom the past three years, BU has spent hundreds of millions of dollars on STEM-related projects: we’ve built the Rajen Kilachand Center for Integrated Life Sciences and Engineering, developed the Engineering Product Innovation Center (EPIC) and refurbished the Metcalf Center for Science and Engineering, just to name a few.
Aside from housing projects revamping dorms, nearly all projects have served STEM students in some way. COM students remember well when $150 million was spent to construct the reflective new CILSE right next to their old-looking college, with its prison-esque exterior that has not been revamped since it was built.
Yes, the CILSE is a state-of-the-art facility dedicated to important neuroscience research, and new buildings like these may reel in applicants looking for a university with modern facilities doing innovative research. But the CILSE building glows from a mile away, while the COM building fades in comparison.
It’s hard for undergraduate students to feel the impact that these new buildings have, aside from the inconvenience of construction on Commonwealth Avenue. It’s especially hard to feel these benefits as someone who — like the majority of BU students — is not at all involved in data sciences.
To give the administration some credit, they are working to develop an area of the school that may still be in its beginning stages, and while these efforts might be hard to understand for students not studying data sciences, the resources available at the new center could prove hugely beneficial for the small portion of the student body who are.
But the fact remains that the administration continues to delay fixing a plethora of issues that already exist — the BU Shuttle, student residences, dining halls — in favor of developing shiny new projects with no palpable benefit to many undergraduate students.
The new center, if approved, will be built next to the Sargent College of Health and Rehabilitation Sciences — quite a central location for a building that isn’t at all interdisciplinary.
It will also take the space of a current parking lot — an inconvenience in terms of driving accessibility. It’s already incredibly difficult to find parking around BU, and the school makes money off of the high rates it charges at these lots, especially during Red Sox games. The meager parking spaces BU does have is another way for the school to garner tourism.
On Sept. 25 at The Daily Free Press’ FreeP Talk, President Robert Brown said that a long-term goal of the administration is to renovate various student residences, most notably Warren Towers.
Warren Towers is notoriously known for being the worst BU dorm. The elevators always seem to be malfunctioning, the fire alarms can be triggered by a hair and the bathroom floors are often flooded. Remedying these issues would make a significant difference in the lives of the up to 1,800 students who live there — a difference far greater than any new science building with a five-story podium can create.
The work that data scientists or neurologists or synthetic biologists do is not more important than the work that any other student does. We should be attracting students of all disciplines to attend our school, and we can’t do that if we place a focus on upgrading research facilities above all else. BU needs to invest in all of its students, regardless of what administrators believe will yield the greatest financial return.
How is data science not interdisciplinary?