university as same

So I'm just back from the recent MAP conference, held this year at the beautiful UCLA campus. This was the first time I've been back to UCLA in at least ten years. I went to UCLA my freshman year in college, LOATHED it, and transferred at the end of the year to UCI, where I found a bunch of nerdy, disconnected and gadget-interested people who were much more my type.

But I digress.

Anyway, UCLA has been transformed since I was last there. The two centerpieces of the campus, Royce Hall and Powell, are built in a nouveau brick-style that is and always was just breathtaking. But when I was there that was about it. Sometime over the years a bunch of that really nasty sixties-style concrete stuff when up all around the periphery. The dorms were atrocious--more like penitentiaries--and the architecture in Westwood kind of followed suit in its mixed way.

So now that's all gone. UCLA has been busy dismantling its ugly buildings and putting up breathtaking new ones. It's really spectacular. When I first arrived, my thought was WOW--I wish I worked here!

But then, when I started looking around inside the buildings, I was disappointed. All the UCs seem to have gone a uniform corporate route: the food courts are made up of the the same Rubios, Sbarros, and Panda Expresses you see everywhere else. The vending machines sell only Pepsi products. The coffee shops are all owned by a single undrinkable conglomerate. It's all the same stuff you see on absolutely every large campus in California.

It's really too bad. UC Irvine has gone the same way, and all the things I remember as being special about it--especially the student-run co-ops--are now gone. The university forced buy-outs and sold everything to the same giant vendors.

And so I returned to SDSU, another corporate campus, happy in the conviction that at least it's no better anywhere else.

Of course, it might be nice to have a few more trees.