What Will the University of Dallas Dart Stop Bring?

02
Jun 2012
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Your thoughts?

Category: It Is What It Is  Tags:
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3 Responses
  1. John P. Bloch says:
    June 4, 2012 at 10:11 AM

    A few positive things it can bring:

    • Bursting the bubble.
    • More opportunities for students to work off-campus, thus being able to alleviate the amount of debt they accrue while attending UD.
    • More opportunities for students to study off-campus where there are fewer distractions.
    • More opportunities for students to spend free time (ha!) off-campus; downtown Dallas has much to see/do.
    • More opportunities for students to live off-campus; let’s face it: Old Mill is not exactly a nice place to live.
    • Eventually, getting from DFW airport to campus will be extremely simple.

    A few negative things it can bring:

    • Bursting the bubble
    • The less students live, work, and play on campus, the looser the bonds of friendship will be. Take a moment to think of all your great friendships from UD and then think how many were commuter students (which I define as “Anybody whose abode could not be reached from campus on foot in under twenty minutes”) for even half their time at UD. I can think of only two (and I’ve lived with both of them)
    • Toothless foreigners
    • Shiftless vagrants

    My take is thus: the DART rail will make everything about UD’s location easier to deal with from a practical perspective, but I have trouble seeing it have anything but deleterious effects on the character of the school and students.

  2. Nick says:
    June 4, 2012 at 6:54 PM

    Schmidz and overnight wanderings through downtown Dallas while waiting for the line to start back up.
    Also, did anybody else see Gautier?!

  3. Peter Hilaire says:
    June 4, 2012 at 9:34 PM

    Toothless foreigners was my favorite! John, you brought up a lot of good points on both sides, and I tend to agree with your final take on the whole thing. Nevertheless, I’m pretty sure that the UD Bubble will not burst from people getting in alone, there are forces internally attempting to burst the bubble. I see the Bubble as a kind of parallel to a wall being built around the place. Just like they had very high walls around the medieval universities, or the walls around the Vatican gardens; these walls were built in order to keep the students in and the others out (sort of) but most of all to keep a certain character to the place–an aire of contemplation and solitude in which to allow the life of the mind to flourish. The modern multi-versity does not want what Waugh describes as the “quiet cloistral hush” of Oxford, it wants DART rails and Pharmacy schools, Business Schools, Alcohol Awareness Programs, EXPANDED HIGHWAYS, BIGGER DORMS, and International Days. These things make everything about UD’s location or the Core Curriculum easier to deal with from a practical perspective.

    Yet the Bubble is what keeps all of those things at bay, or at least makes them something at which students are at first attracted (like a child that gets a new toy), because the Bubble is the core of UD’s character, which is a community of friends devoted to seeking Justice and Truth, which is much more enthralling than a DART Rail will ever be.

    But it doesn’t mean that we can’t use it to our advantage, as Nick points out so well.

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