I recently graduated from CMU, and loved my time here and would recommend the college heavily to anyone wondering whether they should come here. However, with enrollment at almost half of what it was in the peak period of mid-late 00s, I can't help but feel that I missed out on a greater period of Central's history. Seeing relics of the past, like that building on north campus that I'm pretty sure I heard used to be a 24/7 restaurant or something like that with one of those old school phone booths still visible until recently, made me even more curious about how the experience here used to be. What was the campus culture? How crazy were the parties here before that police crackdown a few years back? What defunct restaurants/activities/groups used to be around when campus was more alive? How did anyone find parking back then with such a large enrollment when parking is already such a hassle on campus today?
Anyone who went to CMU in the 2000s before enrollment started declining - what was it like?
CommunityI was on campus from 02-08 for undergrad and grad school. Parking was AWFUL. Twice, I ended dropping a T/R class on the first week because there was no place to park.
SBX and Malt Shop on the north end were cool, but I honestly didn’t know anyone who went there. Seemed like a thing freshmen would do occasionally until the novelty wore off.
Academically, I don’t know that it really was any different. I’ve always been a believer that you get out of education what you put into it. There were just as many complaints about classes/profs back then. If you dug in and made a solid effort, though, even the “hardest” classes taught you something. I thoroughly enjoyed all my student years.
Having spent seven years (14-21) working on the academic side, I DO feel that many instructors and professors have become more jaded and less engaged with classes. Driven by a combination of campus leadership concerns, budgetary constraints that ask more and more from them, and topped off by an overall lack of respect from the majority of students. With shrinking faculty and staff numbers, teaching, grading, advising, researching, recruiting, and assessment are all being lumped on to fewer and fewer plates. Then they show up to class to find only about 3 out of 20 students have any actual interest in the course material, yet the remaining 17 expect the same grades as the 3 who bust ass and kill every assignment. That may not have been EVERYONE’s experience, but that was the sentiment I got from every department meeting I ever sat in.
I graduated from CMU in May 2023 and my mom is a professor there and I agree with everything you said. The parking situation has not gotten better, sadly. As for your commentary on the faculty, having watched that university basically destroy my mother to the point she's retiring a few months early, I concur that profs have become a lot more jaded, and for good reason. So I've got a story for you.
My mom has a few uniquely helpful policies in her classes. One such policy is that you can redo any assignment as many times as needed throughout the term and turn it in up to a week after the class ends in order to get the desired grade. She also doesn't give tests, which students love her for. Since her field isn't as deadline-oriented as some others, she'd rather her students take longer to do an assignment and understand the material than be overly focused on turning in half-assed work on time. My mom has always had exceptional SOS scores (and I should know, I checked her RMP stats and the publicly available info from cmu).
Back in January, my mom had covid for the first time. A student complained to her dept that she "gave homework after the end of the semester" which was a misinterpretation of my mom's lax deadline requirements. In addition to that student giving her a low SOS score (it was obvious who gave her the low score as it was the only low score she received for that class), my mom's average SOS scores went down from a 4.5 to a 4.3. This prompted her dept head to take away 2 of the summer classes, which would have given her a lot of extra money. It didn't help that the university overpaid her for one class then tried to get her to teach another for free to avoid paying the money back.
This isn't the first time the university screwed her over, not was it the worst. It was just the most recent, and the straw that broke the camel's back for her. Now they're trying to offer her emeritus status and she's not even sure she wants it.
I practically grew up on the campuses my mom taught at throughout her career as a professor. Watching her pride in her work deflate over the course of her time at CMU has been heartbreaking, esp because she's not the only prof I've seen lose the light in their eyes.
One thing I will say is that for the most part, the remaining faculty in many depts are really only in it for the students themselves, but the university provides them very little support. 1 in 3 students on campus struggle with food insecurity. Hell, my mom used to have a potluck for her students at the end of each semester but ended up turning it into a pizza party when students began expressing concerns about the cost of bringing food. It broke her heart.
I’m sorry to hear that. I loved a lot of the faculty there. Was she ELA or Comm by chance?
No, she was a professor of teacher ed whose specialty was teaching teachers how to teach reading. She worked with the ELA dept quite a bit when she was trying to get a reading minor onto the bulletin so that the education majors would be able to take classes that taught reading education more in-depth and more relevant to the grades they wanted to teach, with TEPD faculty instead of ELA faculty (idk if any of that made sense). Of course the ELA dept used their leverage to tank it, flushing literal years of work down the drain for my mom and her colleagues. However, you were pretty close to the mark for me: I was an IPR major, so I took a lot of classes from Comm, Journalism, BCA, and more from Moore. I loved most of the faculty in those depts. Jim Wojcik is an absolute legend. I saw the way the university treated him and Steve Coon, and it broke my heart because I respect those 2 men more than my own father, no joke 😂
Do you know Fanning, Bean, or especially McDermott? Those were my peeps.
Fanning and Bean still there! not sure about the other. i could talk someone’s ear off about both of them. they are amazing and saved my life tbh. college has been hell for me these last few years with covid and my own struggles with mental health, and if it wasn’t for Bean asking me to sign up for the creative writing certificate, i don’t think id be here tbh. both of them truly care for students.
They are special educators for sure.
I’m not even in any major that lines up with creative writing, but i can tell you that Bean has been way more supportive than any sociology prof ever. (besides maybe Amanda Garrison and David Kinney) but ugh, if i wasn’t so set on being a therapist i would’ve gone into creative writing JUST because Bean had seen hope in me.
side note, i recognized your username but not from this reddit 😂 i’m from lansing so im on the lansing reddit as well and that’s where i recognized your name from loll 😂
Oh and Steffel. She was amazing.
Those folks don't ring a bell, sorry! From what I observed, it seemed like CMU was hiring more adjunct profs than actual professors, and those made up the majority of the comm classes I took 😅