Cramming for class

When Mamadou Badiane walked into his 9 a.m. advanced Spanish conversation class during the first week of class, he expected a full house of students, a bit groggy perhaps, but otherwise ready for the start of the winter semester.

What he found, however, left him in near disbelief: nearly 30 students had crammed into room 315 of the General Classroom Building for the class, in one of the tighter fits he’d seen in a university setting.

“I walked in, smiled and looked at my students, and then we all kind of laughed because we knew this would be a problem,” said Badiane, an assistant professor of Spanish at MU. “I had to give one student my chair, and there were still a couple of students standing in the back.”

After that class, Badiane immediately went to request a room change, which was approved before the next class. But his situation is just one of many that the University Registrar’s office deals with at the start of every semester, said Victor Price, MU’s associate registrar of records.

“Situations like these generally come about when you have high demand for certain classroom space and limited resources,” Price said. “You’re not always going to satisfy everyone.”

The amount of usable classroom space on campus is an issue that will become increasingly important as MU moves toward its goal of 30,000 students. Total enrollment for the Fall 2006 semester was 28,253. The available space during peak classroom hours is already at a premium. Even more alarming to some officials is that certain times of day outside those peak times are becoming nearly as crowded.

For the 2007 winter semester, 160 classrooms occupying 155,000 square feet of space are controlled by individual schools and departments, according to the MU Department of Space Planning and Management. Another 169 classrooms, totaling 164,150 square feet, are part of the general classroom pool and controlled by the registrar’s office. Classroom use depends on a number of factors, including when classes are scheduled and the number of classrooms that are available at any given time. The growing demand for classroom space means that campus administrators like Price and Scott Shader, MU’s director of Space Planning and Management, are continually looking for ways to accommodate the needs of teachers and students. That begins with making the best use of existing classroom space.

“Of the 45 available teaching hours per classroom every week, the main goal is to try and make every one of those available hours used for scheduled instruction,” Shader said. “Simply put, we all want to organize the most efficient use of space. We want to fill the seats, both in classrooms and in auditoriums.”

Shader and Price said they have to be aware of new courses being added to departments’ curriculum each semester. Depending on the number and especially the size of new classes, which range from 30 to 500, that could make finding the necessary classroom space a problem.

Price said that, right now, there is adequate classroom space for the campus’ needs, as long as students and teachers alike are willing to be more flexible with their scheduling. While the school day runs from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m., the majority of students and teachers want classes between 9 a.m. and 1 p.m.

“When everyone wants equal pieces of these finite resources, the result isn’t always logical,” Price said. “We’re still under an obligation to try and get the problems worked out, and we’re usually successful. We’re here to serve the students as best as we can.”

While there have been some large capital projects on campus in recent years — construction of life sciences facilities and new dormitories, for instance — MU currently has no plans to construct new buildings dedicated to providing more classroom space. One idea, proposed by Michael Devaney, the chairman of the Student Affairs Committee on the MU Faculty Council, is to lengthen the class day by adding either a 5 to 5:50 p.m. time slot or a 5 to 6:15 p.m. time slot. This would increase all existing instructional space by at least 11 percent, said Devaney, associate chairman of electrical and computer engineering at MU, who also serves on the Faculty Council’s advisory committee on space.

Extending the class day would add space without any additional capital outlay, or contracted construction costs, he said. While there would be some minor costs associated with a longer school day, such as paying personnel to repair equipment and additional energy costs, it would be much less expensive than constructing new buildings, Devaney said. He also said that students living off campus would be able to take advantage of free parking during this time period.

Another alternative is to construct new institutional space on the northern edge of campus, at a location near the border of Stephens College, to create space for administrative functions. Devaney said these employees stay in one place most of the day or have official vehicles to transport them. That would free up more of the core of campus for education.

“It is difficult enough at the present time to move from some of the major instructional areas to others within the ten-minute period between classes,” Devaney said. He said moving departments that serve basically as office locations for personnel would be least difficult.

One option is to renovate existing buildings, a process Price said was ongoing and constant on college campuses across the country. “It’s a perpetual process to keep universities in shape,” Price said.

Price and Shader work together to decide which buildings need renovation or expansion, and when that work should be done. But even upgrading a classroom building doesn’t always result in more classroom space. For example, construction on Lafferre Hall in the College of Engineering will bring about the temporary loss of some classroom space.

“When you renovate existing buildings on campus, people always think that everything about the building is going to be improved,” Shader said. “From an aesthetic and technological standpoint, that’s definitely the case. We install new writing boards, ceilings, floors, seats, and other equipment that have made our auditoriums truly state-of-the-art. But what people distant from the situation don’t always grasp is that you can lose space with renovation, too. We can modernize and make a classroom more comfortable for students and faculty, but that comes with the sacrifice of seating space.”

Most classroom renovations are scheduled during breaks and intercessions to minimize the impact. This summer, four classrooms in Middlebush Hall are scheduled to be gutted and completely refurbished to increase space, Price said. But it is not always possible to complete renovations outside of semesters.

“Some construction can cause loss of classrooms for a couple of years, and, in a pinch, we can cope with that,” Shader said. “Coming up, though, we’re going to encounter a more significant amount of time of classroom loss that will put a crunch on the general pool. If you lose one or two classrooms, that’s OK, but to lose six or eight can be a headache.”

Teachers like Badiane believe that having adequate space is important, not only for the students’ comfort but also for their overall learning experience.

“You don’t realize how useful even a small bit of extra space is until you don’t have it anymore,” Badiane said. “If that breathing space is gone, I cannot move in between students to reach them on an individual basis. If that space is gone, I can’t put them in any variation of groups in order to promote different methods of learning. But if that space is there, I can completely and fully interact with my students and give them the most effective feedback. It gives them a better chance to get involved in learning, and that’s still what education is all about.”