Officegate

Uh oh.

Yesterday it was announced that due to increased class sizes and the potential for bringing in new faculty members, the Bush School will no longer provide student offices except to those students who have GAR positions and the SGA president. For many, the dream is now over. A wave of student malcontent manifested itself soon afterward with the inevitable surge of angry facebook status updates, as if to say "Why, Bush School Iscariot? Why?"

The ill feelings can be traced back to last year's interview conference, where we were told that at the Bush School, each student is provided an office within the student office space, to give us a place to work that resembled a real-world workplace as well as to promote camaraderie. After many of us committed to come here, we were then told that only second year students would be receiving offices, and that first year students would be able to use community workspaces. Now, we have been told that there will be no designated offices for second year students, save for the GAR people and the SGA Pres.

This is a disappointing but understandable move by the Bush School. The school needs to grow and evolve, and so bringing in larger classes and fresh blood to the faculty is a good idea. The unfortunate side of this is that the school is beginning to outgrow its space constraints, and so the luxury of having student offices was an obvious choice to sacrifice at the alter of progress.

I'll admit, I'm disappointed about it. When they told us about the student offices at interview conference last year, I thought it was a really simple yet innovative approach for preparing students to work in an office environment. I had never heard of a school doing that before, and I was pretty excited about it. It wasn't the deciding factor for why I chose to come here over a school located in a city with closer access to government opportunities , but it was indeed a factor.

Alas, the hammer has fallen, and it is what it is. So, what now?

Well, one possible solution is to have student/professor offices. It could be like the buddy system. One professor and six students to an office perhaps? It would be fun...

The loss of a potential source of bonding is upsetting to people. We're just going to have to find other ways to do that. We didn't have student offices at Baylor Law, but my class still became a pretty tight knit bunch after a while. What BLS did, and perhaps the Bush School could start doing this, was leave a few of the classrooms open until midnight each night for us to study in. That was where a lot of us worked/bonded/commiserated.

Going back to my earlier proposal, there's always the office space upstairs. The Bush School needs lebensraum moreso than the Econ and Poli Sci departments do, it's time to expand our borders. Let's just move in up there, use the offices openly and notoriously, and see if they file legal action to kick us out. If they don't, the school might be able to claim the office space 10 years from now through adverse possession. A Bush School invasion is something I would like to be a part of...