Benchmarks: met

By Nate Adams
Collegian Editor
September 19, 2007

With all the gossip about west campuses, demolishing Benilde Halls and Japanese Tea Houses, it’s easy to miss the smaller changes taking place on our fair campus. Little things are popping up all over. Improvements like new classrooms in Olney, new security booths by the La Salle Apartments and Wister and fancy new paintjobs in the dining halls are pleasant and much needed. Still, nothing has classed up this joint more than the spiffy new benches that magically appeared overnight and now dot the South Campus landscape.

La Salle’s move to give its students more places to rest their collective behinds is a pretty smart one. In a recent poll conducted in my dorm room, 100 percent of college students prefer sitting down to standing. Furthermore, a whopping 100 percent of students polled prefer to sit in designated resting places (chairs, benches, love seats, etc.) as opposed to locations that are not recognized or University-sanctioned for sitting (cacti, rose gardens, SGA president Jon Webster). La Salle has heard the cry of the students and responded with forest green furniture.

Who among us hasn’t made the walk from North Dorms to the Communication Center and thought to themselves “Man, I really could use a place to sit and rest for a minute before class?” That walk through South Campus, once a soulless trudge through a barren wasteland of hopelessness, is now a lighthearted prance through a dewy meadow of comfortable seating.

Honestly, what argument can be made against more benches around campus? The “students will get drunk and steal them” argument is moot, seeing as those babies are bolted tight to blocks of concrete, and most undergrads don’t carry crescent wrenches to parties with them. Same goes for the “students will get drunk and vandalize them” argument. These aren’t the cheap, backyard benches you used to have tea parties on. These bad boys are made out of cold, unyielding steel, the same stuff they make submarines out of. Well, they’re made out of some kind of metal, at least.

The only anti-bench argument I could come up with that holds any water is that La Salle runs the risk of giving homeless people somewhere new and exciting to sleep, and even that theory is flawed. For one thing, the South Campus benches are located in extremely well lit areas of campus. Not ideal sleeping conditions, especially when the sweet midnight of Wister Woods is a hop, skip and a jump away. Even if we do see an increase in the number of vagrants around campus, La Salle can just spin it as a public service to help the less fortunate. La Salle gets good press and we students get to swap stories with street people. Everyone wins.

Any way you look at it, the addition of benches around campus is a plus. For everyone who is afraid of change and can’t abide this increase in comfort, I’d love to hear your arguments. We’ll hash it out; just let me sit down first.

adamsn1@lasalle.edu