|
Proposal:
|
There is a serious, and annoying, parking issue on campus that affects our students, especially graduate students engaged in their academic work. It has to do with the way events, especially sporting events, take precedence over academic activities on campus. Let me be specific: many of the students (especially graduate students) who work in the various science and engineering buildings at my end of campus, adjacent to Route 1, are assigned to the various parking lots around and near to the Comcast Center. Whenever there is a sporting event in the Comcast Center, or even at Byrd Stadium, the Athletic Department wants to use all the parking spaces near the event location. Students assigned to these parking lots are required to move their vehicles to distant parking lots before these events to allow the Athletic Department to take over all the spaces. If students do not move their vehicles they are ticketed and/or towed. This is extremely disruptive of research, since graduate students frequently work at odd hours and on weekends, and their ability to carry out their graduate work without wasting time is adversely affected. One of my own graduate students, who was in the middle of a crucial experiment, did not move his car and had to pay en extremely large parking fine. It is true that a student can petition Campus Parking to get a special permit to allow them to leave their vehicle in its assigned lot on a limited number of occasions during events. However, given that we now have license plate recognition in our parking lots, it should be possible for all graduate students assigned to the lots that the Athletic Department wants to control 100% to be automatically exempt from moving their vehicles to make way for sporting events. Our graduate students, and maybe all students, who are parked in their assigned lots should be allowed to remain there whenever they are working on campus, and not be subject to the disruptive treatment to which they are now subjected by Campus Parking at the behest of the Athletic Department.
Graduate students parking in their assigned lots should be allowed to remain there during events without any risk of being ticketed or towed. Consideration should be given as to whether all students should be allowed to remain in their assigned lots during events. These actions should be taken to emphasize the paramount important of academic work on campus and to facilitate academic activity. |
