Slippery Rock University is home to a number of beautiful and useful buildings that each have a purpose on this campus. However, some buildings have been vacant for quite some time and have become nothing but eyesores, and SRU isn’t doing anything about them.
With these buildings lying useless around campus, it’s strange that the university would use the bond financing from the Pennsylvania State System of Higher Education’s Board of Governors to renovate some other buildings on campus, such as Spotts World Culture Building and Strain Behavioral Science Building.
Krauss Hall, formerly Riviera Hall, is a former SRU residence hall building located on Main Street right next to Subway. Most students have no idea that this building once housed Rock alumni, let alone that its is even part of the university.
Today, Krauss Hall no longer serves any purpose at the university except that it is used for police training.
Perhaps the board of trustees should consider a new purpose for the abandoned building before deciding to renovate some other buildings that don’t require immediate attention.
The least they could do is just knock it down and use the space for an extra commuter parking lot until they decide to fill it with something else.
Another useless building on campus that hasn’t had classes in it for some time is the abandoned Miller Auditorium, which currently just serves as a painful reminder to both the theatre and dance departments that the university will not make it a priority to renovate it so each department has a proper space to perform and rehearse in.
No one who has been on staff for the past four years has even seen a play in the building, even though promises of restoration were issued last year.
Instead, the dance department has been stuck in West Gym for the past four years and is forced to perform in spaces such as Swope Recital Hall where the performers do not have proper technical equipment, proper lighting and no dressing room.
In Swope, the female dancers are forced to change in and out of their outfits in the Swope band room where music majors sometimes wander in to grab their musical equipment, compromising the privacy of the dancers. Meanwhile, all the male dancers are not permitted to change in the same room as the women and must change in the bathroom.
Regarding the theatre department at SRU, the graduating seniors will now have gone all four years of their time here without performing on an actual stage.
It seems pretty silly that students who are paying for a degree from Slippery Rock University have payed an annual $5,000 tuition to have performed inside the Multipurpose Room of the old University Union, rather than having performed in an actual theater. Of course, if that student were out-of-state, he or she would be paying roughly $10,000 annually.
It is SRU’s duty to stop wasting the space they have, and make a commitment to utilizing buildings to accommodate the students.
In terms of Miller Auditorium, they can offer no excuse good enough. However, the rennovations to Spotts World Cultures and Strain Behavioral Science Building are in desperate need. Spotts has not been a sound or safe building for years. The same can be said for Strain. Neither of those builidings have received rennovations in some time and both are an additional eye-sore on campus. It is rather easy to understand why Kraus isn’t a priority to the university and I doubt they’d now what to do with it if they bothered to put any money into it.