TODAY at Minnesota State Mankato is published in May, August and January and mailed to 90,000 alumni and friends. The mission of TODAY is to entertain, inform and connect readers to campus.
Fall 2005
Volume 7 Issue 1
When the lower campus closed, MSU had more than a century of history, but it was a young place. They called it the Highland Campus, the hilltop site where construction had taken off during the 1960s. New residence halls. New classroom buildings. New athletic facilities. The campus grew at a time when new meant efficient and functional, not necessarily welcoming and comfortable. A fresh wave of construction and renovation in the past few years has changed that. Today's facilities provide attractive – even inspiring – spaces, and some of those earlier buildings have been remade to give students places to go and gather, places where they want to stay.
Each building creates an image, and each image represents an idea. Old Main – a dignified edifice with a commanding view of the city – dominates recollections of the lower campus. The building said something important about the University, and people liked what it said. Today's campus has a new architectural iconography. To the east, the sweeping curve of Taylor Center's glass façade reveals a concourse lined with mementos of athletic and academic history. To the west, a gleaming addition to Centennial Student Union creates a new front door to campus, one that leads to a three-story hearth room where a flames glow in a huge fireplace made from locally quarried Kasota stone. These join other images of a campus that is modern but not cold, new but connected to its past and its place.
To sit in Wiecking Auditorium these days is almost disorienting to anyone who knew the place before. This, after all, was the dim room where freshmen slouched in corners and fanned themselves with notebooks while instructors bellowed at 200 or more students crowded in rows of squeaking seats. Having undergone a complete makeover, the auditorium now shines, its echoes and shadows gone. Instructors control state-of-the-art projection and sound systems, and their students enjoy new lighting, seating and air conditioning. To be here is to learn how potential can lie in unexpected places, and that seems like a good metaphor for any university.
The Student union forms the heart of any campus, the center of student life and the only place that is devoted entirely to those vital aspects of the college experience that occur outside the classroom. For more than thirty years, Centennial Student Union was well-used, but its design was form-follows-function to a fault. This spring, the CSU reopened fully to students after a renovation that reshaped and renewed the building. The project unified many public areas, clearing away walls that obscured views of the fountain outside, blocked natural light and created cramped rooms for designated uses. Now, students walk into a hearth room that connects a great, wideopen space on two levels, all of it splashed with color and furnished with dining tables, cozy couches and chairs, and rows of computer stations. The new CSU invites students to get comfortable, to settle in and hang out as long as they want.
A lifetime is an assemblage of moments. Four thousand fans roar as the Mavericks take the lead inside Bresnan Arena at the Taylor Center. A class watches a foreign film in an auditorium that is better-equipped than some theaters back home. Four friends laugh as they slide into a booth in the Global Learning Lab, a warm and bright space created in what had been a quiet corner of the library basement, a place that is now a high-tech platform for traditional classes and casual study. These are the moments people remember, moments small and large. And they are all part of one night on MSU's campus, a place that is not so young anymore but one with a new identity, a stronger sense of community.
Nick Healy is an editor for Compass Point Books and an adjunct faculty member in MSU's Department of English. He was awarded a 2005 McKnight Individual Artist Grant from Prairie Lakes Regional Arts Council, and one of his short stories will appear in a forthcoming issue of The Georgetown Review.
