Temperatures are finally dropping. Winter is on its way. The weather outside is frightful; and as a student at UMB, I feel all but delightful.
Students walking from the Peninsula, Harbor Point, or any one of the parking lots around campus look forward to the warmth of being indoors. However, when they come indoors, the classrooms are often frigid. Most classrooms are piping hot in the summer, but drafty and downright chilly in the winter. They are never the temperature you want them to be. It’s as though the gods of UMB are working against your better health.
Do the thermostats in the classrooms even work? Maybe. But, by the time that the temperature changes from either extreme to a happy 68 degrees, you’re already onto your next class.
Regardless, it is quite possible that these so-called thermostats are nothing more than an elaborate ploy by the administration to make students believe that they have control over the temperature in their classrooms. This might induce a placebo thermo-somatic effect. A student feeling the irrepressible chill of December may actually feel warmer after inching the prop-thermostat up a few meager degrees.
Students may no more have control over the weather outside than they do in Wheatley or McCormack. Why not put a thermostat outside the Campus Center, or perhaps on the lower thigh of the Iron Worker?
Maybe we should put a thermostat in the catwalk.
For those of you who don’t know (though, how you’ve numbly navigated the stale air of these external halls is an enigma), the catwalks are infamous for their extreme temperature variation. Indeed, the entire spectrum of temperatures is present in those busy halls. In the catwalks closer to the Wheatley we have the tropics. Snug between McCormack and the Science Building is the temperate zone, a thermal mirror of the state of Massachusetts. Finally, the other pole is the frigid, wind-torn arctic of the Healey Library and the Quinn Administration Building. Bring your jacket and your bikini, you’ll need both of them.
A UMB student’s life regularly passes into and out of different environments. We have no control. If only indignation could keep us warm; certainly our tuition and fees are no kind of protection.