Courting the Bohemoth

The Davis Center is nice and all, don’t get me wrong, pretty nice even, but was it really all that necessary.
Was it necessary for those years of heavy construction where a literally wedge bottlenecked off Central Campus from Athletic and beyond? Was the $6 (or however much) million in our hard earned tuition really all that well spent?
We had everything that the Davis Center provides somewhere else on campus long before it was ever conceived. We had a bookstore, which is now nothing more then gravel and payment. There, if you didn’t have anything on your Cat Scratch for that Catamount baseball cap you could just walk three meters to the Cat Scratch office. In Davis center you got to walk down three stories. We had Billings Student Center. Hell I liked Billings. The kewl wooden ceiling arches and the underground passages that led to who knows where. All the quant little student clubs of little importance already they’re needed spaces. And Cook Commons was the only place you could get good mash potatoes, now the place is just blocks.
You walk into Davis and you are bombarded by sleazy commerce trying to wheedle you at of your hard earned cash. An entire bank branch to scam our UVMers into credit cards and high interest loans. A Vermont local goods shop with freaking sheep’s wool, what the hell is that? A bar?! Yeah great job Fogel trying to make us look less like a party school. It feels like the lame little brother of the Mall of America.
The whole place seems so impersonal and mean. Roman pillars holding up nothing of importance. The largest single building in Vermont with the widest set of stairs. There’s a freaken “Earth Day Flag” flying out in front to add to the hypocrisy of such a ginormous building in Vermont with air conditioning. And I swear on Odysseus’s sense of direction every time I open and close the main doors by the “Oval” it sounds like they’re laughing at me. I’m serious.
What I’m trying to say is that all this expansion isn’t necessarily a good thing. As our numbers begin to swell and our campus along with it, our school is going to lose that close nit charm that first brought us here. Friendly strangers will digress into just more faces into the crowd. And this symbol of overt centralization for the sake of centralization is just the start.