Since colleges are in the business of providing a service and making piles of money for that service, I am reminded of my recent Utica College experience and how it could have been better. Just like any business that is motivated by greed and huge profits, colleges have to ensure that the service they provide to consumers - in this case a college education – is worth the money students and their parents (not to mention the government) are going to shell out for a UC education. Utica College has done a lot in the last few years to enhance the quality of their learning experience: they have built new dorms, added a sky-lighted addition to their gym, constructed a new science building and criminal justice center, and added other improvements like a crunchy smoothie bar and a Starbucks bistro. They have also recruited hip and young new professors like Jason Denman, John Foreman and Gary Leising. These smart 30-something professors, along with all the other new and modern additions to the college campus, have gone a long way in hoisting UC out of the dowdy Dark Ages and placing it in the realm of present day coolness.
But UC still has room to improve, and - here’s the good part! - these improvements are mostly cheap aesthetic touch-ups or problems which can be solved with a little bit of student staff training.
1. From the main North to South walkways on campus, there is a view of two of West Utica’s biggest blights: the haunted old Lunatic Asylum and Donovan Middle School. Students do not need to be reminded of these vomit-inducing eyesores while they are attempting to learn things that will hopefully enable them leave Utica someday. And what is worse, from the football stadium and soccer fields, these monstrosities come into sharper focus hinting at the barren prospects which may await UC students after they graduate and attempt to navigate Utica’s employment wasteland. A view of New Hartford or Clinton would be more preferrable, and the hills of the Mohawk Valley look beautiful beyond the scarred landscape of West Utica, but unfortunately it is hard to ignore all that crap in the foreground no matter how hard one tries.
I suggest UC plant tall bushy trees to block the view of Donovan Middle School and the hollow Lunatic Asylum so that the college is enclosed in its own sweet stateliness. It is much easier for students and professors to ignore what lies beyond the college environment if they can’t see it. All that will be visible are the hills of the Mohawk Valley which cradle the thruway and train tracks, a comforting reminder of the region’s links to Civilization. Furthermore, I think high hedges or small trees should be planted along the row of West Utica houses which gird the college’s soccer and football fields. These neighborhoods offer a similar reminder as the yucky landmarks of the area’s blighted Rustiness which is not conducive to learning or money making. Therefore they need to be blocked out, for the sake of the residents who no doubt don’t want to see anything beautiful, and for the students who are paying good money not to be exposed to depressing, sick crap.
As for the fear of offending the West Utica community: don’t worry about them, they can’t even afford to pay attention let alone attend Utica College.
2. The athletic center at UC is a nice escape from the unhealthy and life-truncating atmosphere of Utica. It is pumped full of clean and dry artificial air which is much more easy on the throat and lungs than the air in Utica which is clogged full of deadly carcinogens, dank heat or biting cold, and asthma causing car exhaust (vehicles in the Mohawk Valley are not required to have catalytic converters, so they all smell like 1950’s gas guzzlers). It contains the latest in exercise machines, and students can work out in front of flat screen tv’s and watch ESPN footage of football games in Florida, a place they may end up moving to once they earn their ticket out of the Mohawk Valley. The gym complex also has hypnotic racquetball courts, an indoor swimming pool, basketball courts, dance rooms, underground locker rooms, offices and a physical therapy program.
But as a private institution, UC does not seem very concerned about preserving the integrity of their gym for their paying members. About as many non-UC students use the gym at any given time as paying UC students do. This went on while I was a student at Utica College and it still goes on today. As an undergraduate, I remember often having to compete for space and equipment with people who were not always as happy to share as somebody like me who was raised in an upper middle class family. It is always easy to spot the non-student members of the community too by their stench, rudeness and dirt-smeared clothing.
As a paying student who pumped thousands of dollars of my own money into Utica College, I was not happy to share my athletic facility with members of the community who just wanted a place to go during the day to escape their poverty and boredom. The elderly took up all the lanes in the swimming pool and urinated underwater so frequently that the pool was yellow and salty flavored. Lowlife perverted homosexuals could often be found in the locker rooms showering and grooming themselves endlessly or just sitting in the saunas waiting for a student to walk in. What is worse, campus security was useless. They were either oblivious to these things that went on, or they just didn’t care. The staff workers who were supposed to be checking student ID’s and gym membership cards weren’t doing their jobs either. They never so much as requested an ID or a membership card from somebody whose appearance would obviously raise a few flags. The seventy year old man was allowed to enter the swimming pool unhindered where he would subsequently urinate and cuss at any student who veered into his lane. The ghetto scum were allowed to check out basketballs which they would often steal. The minorities, resentful of the white power structure, would utilize the gym and sometimes verbally or physically assault white students (like telling the girls that they looked like bitches and skanks).
Adding injury to insult, I believe to this day that I was punished for trying to raise awareness to this problem on campus. After authoring a petition and collecting dozens of signatures a few years ago, I submitted my petition to the president of the college and demanded immediate action. What followed was a stepped up security presence at the gym. Staff started asking everybody for their student IDs or membership cards, and countless people were being turned away for not having them. This lasted a few weeks, and then I graduated. I felt good that I was able to contribute this change to the college before leaving; it was going to henceforth be my legacy.
But in the weeks after graduating when I continued to use the gym, people started scrutinizing me. Now that I was an alumnus, I was informed that I would have to purchase an expensive pass each semester to continue using the athletic center. Okay, no problem. I did that, but still people continued to scrutinize me. Sometimes I would forget my pass and be turned away. It didn’t matter that there were people in the gym who knew me and could vouch for me. Sometimes this helped, but oftentimes it didn’t. Meanwhile, the scum from the community started flooding back in unhindered. The octogenerarians returned to the swimming pool and turned it into their big, pissy public bath again. The homos returned and started peeking at everybody in the locker rooms. But meanwhile people continued to scrutinize me suspiciously. They made me feel like a deviant, a trespasser and a terrorist. I still had to renew my expensive gym membership each semester, while the other non-students got to do whatever they wanted without raising the slightest suspicion.
It was enough to make me want to rip up my UC degree and demand my thousands of dollars back. I am certain that they were giving me a taste of my very own non-charitable and exclusive attitude which I espoused in my petition letter to the president. Fine, I thought, if they want to teach me a lesson about charity and sharing, let them do it in a less visceral and costly way. But for them to treat me like the wrongdoer, and to show favoritism to the non-students was just plain sickening. I suppose this is what they teach people at Notre Dame, Utica’s sorry excuse for a Catholic high school. They thought they were giving me my comeuppance, but all they were doing was spoon-feeding me Utica’s vile and perverted version of Catholicism – a unique and retarded form of Catholicism which shares almost nothing in common with traditional name brand Catholicism.
Don’t get me wrong! I believe in charity, only I believe in democratic charity as opposed to Catholic charity. If poor community members want to use UC’s gym, let them go through proper channels to do it. Let some agency such as Family Services write a grant to pay the semester-long membership fees for selected people in Cornhill. If people act up and start name-calling and stealing equipment, they should be suspended or terminated from using the gym services. There are rules in life, and if some staffer neglects their duty and service by allowing non-students to use the gym in order to win points with Saint Peter, then they are not being good stewards of the Earth. Furthermore, for the school to collectively punish me for not being a charitable Catholic is crazy. I suppose they would burn me at the stake if they could get away with it, so insanely backwards are their beliefs.
What the student staff workers who man the desks need to do is: Ask every person who is using the gym/racquetball courts/swimming pool/borrowing equipment, etc. for either a current student ID or a membership card. If somebody is a stranger and they cannot produce either, they should be turned away. There should be no, “Well, you can swim today but next time you must have your card.” No, because the next time they show up they’ll do something different with their hair or something to look different and they’ll get to workout for free again. Each student should be properly trained to follow these rules, and if they are not following these rules then they must be relieved from their positions. I know there can be a tendency to get lazy after a while and forget to check, or somebody might hate their job or whatever, but UC needs to remember that it is in the business of making money. And taking my money, for instance, to pay for the gym so that poor people from the community can use it for free is just plain wrong. UC did not ask for my permission to do this, and if my tuition money is paying the salaries of the student workers who are supposed to be checking people’s IDs and cards, I want to know that these people are doing their jobs and not letting people through because they want to go to heaven. If a student is neglecting their post for religious reasons, then UC is the wrong place for them. Last time I checked, Utica College is not a Catholic institution. If people want to be able to practice their religion freely, they can do it at one of the many Catholic colleges and institutions in America (like LaMoyne).
3. UC needs a shuttle service. If Hamilton College can have vans to taxi students around, so can Utica College. I know Hamilton students might be unfamiliar with the city of Utica and its surrounding areas, and for this they might need a taxi service. Furthermore, their college is located inconveniently on a hill where the buses rarely ever go. Okay, Hamilton needs a shuttle service.
But UC has several dorms, and even though many of the students who reside in these dorms might only live an hour or two from Utica, they aren’t exactly familiar with Utica’s streets in the same way that locals are. Also, Utica arguably has some of the worst ghettos in the Western Hemisphere. For this reason alone, every college in the area would be amiss not to provide a complimentary shuttle service to their full and part-time students.
While volunteering in the community as a student at UC, it was my responsibility to find my own transportation to and from the locations where I would be giving something back. Often I was given poor directions (“just take Genesee St. and turn left here and it’s right across from the Dunkin Donuts”) and informed that I could take the bus (“yeah, the bus will drop you off, like, a block away”). I later remember thinking how, if a massacre like the one that occurred not too long ago in Binghamton had happened and my peers and I were caught in the middle, this would not reflect well on Utica College when it came to light that they don’t provide shuttle service for students to and from volunteer sites. Utica is a very foreign and unsafe city, all of us here at The Utican agree to this, and there are sections where we just won’t go without the assistance and protection of body armor and sidearms. Because we lack these things here at our world headquarters, there are streets in Utica which we have never driven on (let alone walked on). We take it for granted that people like us simply don’t venture down Court Street or stand on a corner whistling while waiting for a bus at the corner of James and Steuben Streets.
A college located in such nightmarish city needs to do more to protect its students, even if this protection is more of a gesture than anything else. Providing shuttle service to volunteer sites is merely a gesture that offers a false sense of safety. After all, once students are dropped off at volunteer sites anything can happen to them. But I would rather have this false assurance of protection instead of nothing at all. Being given crappy directions and told that I can take the bus makes me feel like an afterthought. I know the college wants to project an image of charitable benevolence to the larger community (this is part of their money making agenda), but they send students out into the local ghettos as if they are expendable pawns.
Why should anybody give their money to an institution which cares so little for its consumers? People give their money to Big Tobacco and McDonald’s, but these death dealers are more or less transparent about the products they sell and the consequences of excessively consuming these products. Higher Education tries to prop itself up with fancy notions and ideals, it promises big rewards, a lifetime of comfort, a key which can unlock any door. But look at the facts concerning the Mohawk Valley: the economy has been churning along in Great Depression mode for as long as people can remember, the average entry level job pays hardly more than minimum wage (and offers even less in the way of benefits), and the trickle of people out of the area seeking a better life for themselves and their children has left the social atmosphere as dead and vacant as the empty storefronts and shuttered streets that haunt the city.
How is an expensive Utica College degree going to be an asset in this type of environment? How will it benefit me to give thousands of dollars to UC when I won’t even be able to get a job that will allow me to eat, wear clothes, drive a car and have a roof over my head after I graduate? What is the good in being able to break into intellectual discussions on various topics when the average Joe in Utica is so mentally sluggish that it takes him all day to change a tire? Unless my expensive Utica College degree was preparing me for a wonderful life outside of Utica (like, say, in Albany or Burlington, VT), I got duped by some pretty gimmicky false advertising.
And I’m sure similar cases can be made all across America. Like, for instance, if you live in Jerome, Arizona, a dust bowl of a town in the middle of nowhere, a place consisting of a few ramshakle Western-movie style houses that stick out of the hills of Jerome like tombstones, and you think having a college degree from the nearest college will make all the difference in your life, only to discover that once you complete the degree requirements and get handed your scroll, you are still stuck in Jerome, you are smarter, but still stuck in your little cul de sac of a town, with no way of getting a job that will provide all the benchmarks of success, and no way of working your way out of that little hell hole either, you are just stuck there, more miserable than you were before because now you are smart and high-minded, and you were promised a tract home house and an office park job in Phoneix, and now you want nothing less than this, and if someone offers you a job at the local town hall for $10 an hour you spit at it, and curse the fools for being an ignorant bunch of hicks, $10 per hour is for people with associates degrees, you say, and I have a BS degree in engineering, what kind of an insult is this?
Colleges will go on preaching the same old bull shit no matter what: i.e., a college degree is a key that can unlock any door; people with college degrees make 30-40K per year while people with high school diplomas flip burgers for a living; a college education will make you as smart as Einstein; a college degree will enable you to live to be 80 years old unlike the high school dropouts who die at the age of 43; Et cetera, Et cetera. Some colleges have a right to preach this high-minded rhetoric, but most don’t. What gets me is that colleges preach this message regardless of the situations surrounding the actual physical location of the college. If a college in East St. Louis promises wealth, intelligence, happiness and sophistication, one needs to stop and think, “Wait, I’m going to go to college in East St. Louis, but then what the hell am I going to do once I graduate and I have to go out into the East St. Louis community?” Asking a question as simple as this will make a person realize if, say, an investment in Utica College is worth it or not. If one pays $20K per year for a UC education, will they even be able to get a job making at least $20K per year after graduating (because if I’m paying big money for my college education, I expect high earning results when I go out into the workforce). If one is going to apply to business school in a certain city, it might not be a bad idea to do a little research about that city’s local economy. For instance, what type of industries does it have and what is the salary of the average worker? This will give you some insight into what type of real world experience the business school faculty has and how that experience (or lack thereof) might shape the curriculum. Ideally, New York City is the best place to get an MBA as all the world centers of banking and finance are located in New York. But if you are planning on earning your MBA from, say, Colgate University, a competitive school located in the tiny hick village of Hamilton, NY, you might receive an education that is more notional and which lacks the real world experiences to back it up (unless, of course, you have internships in Manhattan). I’m not saying there is anything particularly wrong with a notional education, but you might want to consider whether you think you could learn more from professors who simply read a lot, or professors who not only read, but who are actively involved with various people and institutions in America’s largest business mecca. It is one thing to look at hills and cows on your way to and from class as you think about ticker tapes and economies and global markets, and it is another to look at futuristic towers of financial giants piercing the sky.
That being said, I think Utica College could potentially have a fairly reputable MSW program if it tried, and the planners at UC might want to consider incorporating and trying to achieve a big name Social Work school before they go ahead with tacking on a law school program to the college’s gamut of advanced degrees. Any big name anything associated with a college gets passed on to the rest of the institution and boosts overall ratings, which generates money for the school. Anyone can spend 5 minutes in Utica and instantly realize that it is a hurting city which could never have too many social workers. In fact, the same can be said for all of upstate NY. What if Utica College could be the Social Work capital of Central New York? What if it could be ranked in US News & World Report as having one of the top 10 best social work schools? This is the way that colleges and universities need to go. They need to stop being closed institutional microcosms and pay more attention to their respective communities. By being in touch with their local communities, colleges need to offer sensible services that line up with the needs and realities of these communities. They should stop making universal claims about success, wealth, happiness and yada yada yada. These things are taken for granted by any aspiring college student. Moreover, higher tuition equals a desire for higher earning power. If a city cannot provide students with the lucrative jobs they desire, then colleges should sponsor recruiting events which host employers from nearby cities which have those lucrative jobs. Finally, colleges should make sure to provide students with internships in bigger cities so they actually have a chance of being hired and landing the job that is going to pay them the bigger salary they crave once they graduate. It does not benefit an institution of higher learning to act embarrassed about the lagging economy of the city it is located in and falsely promise recent grads that the rewarding careers they seek are out there when they’re not.
UC is guilty of this practice, and when I look around me I don’t see any lucrative jobs, all I see are jobs at the ARC, UCP and APAC which barely pay more than minimum wage. The local job market is crap, the pay is crap, the benefits are crap, and the work is crap. When I was part of the microcosm of UC, I couldn’t see much further than my own college environment and the high-minded notions and ideals I projected onto it. It was a beautiful world to say the least, but I have come to realize that the environment surrounding UC is anything but beautiful. It is a wasteland of poverty, death, drugs, disease and depression. And in describing this I am mostly describing Utica, but New Hartford, with all its high hedges, McMansions and cruising foreign sedans, is the fakest of fake towns in all of the fakeville places in fakeworld. Judging by the template pattern the developers of the suburb followed (which is no doubt based on the layout of actual rich places like Riverdale, NY and Lakeforest, WI), one would expect it to be a town full of loafer wearing Ralph Lauren models who didn’t work but spent their days getting their pubises waxed and training their Pomeranians to speak. It is a damn shame that I bought into the supposed sophistication and coolness of New Hartford once, and it is even sadder that some people will spend their whole lives in that town never knowing what an actual rich person looks like or talks like. But still, there is only room in New Hartford’s ranks for a few UC grads each year, and most of these people will come by their jobs thanks to the help of family connections. This means the other several hundred of us must find work elsewhere, and the prospects are not good in Utica, and just about as bad in the small towns that dot the space between Utica and Syracuse and Utica and Albany.
It is not good to say the least, and this Recession is only making matters worse. I don’t know where to go from here, or what to do to get myself unstuck and back on the ball again. I want to feel the way I did when I was an undergrad at UC. I want to be able to look at the world and make it my own reality instead of seeing it for the way it really is. I guess one could say that I’ve lost my peace of mind, and I don’t know how I’m going to get it back. UC afforded me a peace of mind that let me sleep at night, but I have been without that calm contentedness for a while now, and the further I get from it the less precious and valuable it once seemed. This is because my studies at Utica College were enjoyable and intellectually challenging in a way that no job I’ve either had or read about in the area since graduating can even come close to fulfilling or satisfying.
I guess the answer lies outside of Utica. The only way I could ever feel happy in the Mohawk Valley is by remaining a student forever, but the whole purpose of college is to prepare you for life. Unfortunately, life has proved ellusive for me, but I constantly see its glow and hear its call on the horizon.
