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Opinion | New student center should be an extension, not replacement

Editorial Board

The building of the Armstrong Student Center (ASC) is no secret to anyone at Miami University and the surrounding community. The excitement has been building among students and faculty as the months go by, all anticipating its January opening. The new features in the ASC will certainly foster student relationships with other students, but have we already, as a Miami community, forgotten about our previous central hub Shriver Student Center?

Shriver Center will still remain as an open building across from the ASC and will become home to student services and organizations such as Career Services and The Rinella Learning Center. The Heritage Room and PNC Bank's home office will still remain in the building as well, something the ditorial board believes is extremely beneficial to students. There are also hopes to expand the bookstore into a larger Apple Store that will accommodate cell phone plans. Hopefully Shriver will become more of a central meeting place for students and a chance for organizations to provide services.

The Miami Student Editorial Board believes that the ASC should be more of an extension of Shriver Center, and should not simply replace Shriver in it's entirety. As the community has seen with Shriver Center, not every service, organization and office can fit into one central building. Even though the ASC will become a central place for students, the board believes that Shriver Center should still remain central to student life.

This is a great chance to utilize two buildings to give students everything they need right across the street from one another. The services that are staying in Shriver as well as the ones that are being moved there next year are integral to student life. For services that are moving out of Shriver Center, there could be great use for study spaces in those locations to further enhance student life in the building.

The Shriver Center should be kept as important as it is now and not forgotten with the addition of the ASC. The board also hopes that Shriver Center will keep Tuffy's and some kind of food market so that students and faculty still have the convenience of being able to enjoy themselves while in the building just as they did before.

There is also much space dedicated to kitchen and dining use in Shriver, and we hope that these spaces can somehow be utilized to benefit students. They could be put to good use, but if they are not, it will become another wasted space in a building that really can foster the relationship between Miami and its students.

Either way, the board understands that the ASC will be extremely beneficial to the Miami community, but we still hope for next January that Miami still emphasizes the importance of Shriver with not only current students but with the upcoming first-year class.

Miami has a chance to use these two buildings to further build and foster relationships between students and the Miami community. However, if Shriver just becomes another building without a central purpose to student life, there is a chance we will end up being right back to the problem of limited space in one student center. The ASC should be looked at as more of an addition of Shriver and not a replacement in order for great things to happen within these two buildings.

A column in the Aug. 28, 2012 issue of The Miami Student had the incorrect byline. The opinion article titled "Romney's elusive nature won't help him win the Presidency" was incorrectly attributed to Olivia Brough. The story has been removed from the website because the actual author could not be identified.


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