I think it’s safe to say that the College of Arts and Sciences (CAS) needs to be handled better for the classes it holds. That and the ELS Language Center are the two most oddly-utilized buildings on campus, but ELS is too small to make any major changes right away. CAS has tons of classrooms that have the chance to be revamped and labeled for specific areas of study, rather than the building being a catch-all for professors whose classes just got randomly switched into there.
My COMM 375 class was intended to be in GHH. However, we were switched over to CAS at the beginning of this semester. While I’m used to it now, we have a significant amount of people in the class filling the many desks in the room, but like with any classroom in CAS, maneuvering around is out of the question. If you chose to go sit in the back corner of a room, good luck even trying to get through everyone else just to get to the door. I’m in this exact position usually, so I just plan not to move for the whole class.
How can we start improving this building? Definitely start with desk/table management depending on the size of the classroom. I know that so much goes into organizing limited seating for various classes, so we would first have to determine what classes would be held in the building.
From my experience, I’ve mostly had literature and math classes here, and so the “Sciences” part isn’t too present. The “Arts” aspect should be more central, because there’s auditoriums for music-related classes, English classes, etc. I do think that Gen-Ed classes are an exception to have once in a while because underclassmen usually bounce around between buildings before they zone in on their majors.
The building could be more or less centered around creative writing and other arts, because I’ve only had one entry-level writing class in ELS, so I feel like even that could be placed in CAS. Why else do we even need ELS? Regardless, CAS is a building with more potential than this campus has given it, and I believe in the coming years it deserves all these upgrades.
