Sunday, August 26, 2007
You got Plato in my popcorn
Christian Trejbal
Recent columns
- Making sense of local elections
- Voters have only themselves to blame
- Money flows freely to local candidates
- Candidates contemplate a little big-box store
From the RoundTable blog
Back-to-school season is a little different this year for some New River Community College students. Those in Montgomery County have a brand-new campus -- of a sort. They no longer head to the dumpy little building on Roanoke Street in Christiansburg. This year, classes are at the mall.
A mall-college. It's a strange juxtaposition of opposites, an oxymoron if you will.
Higher education ... New River Valley Mall.
Herman Melville, integrals, the American Revolution and hash tables ... Victoria's Secret, Software Etc., American Eagle Outfitters and Radio Shack.
The knowledge of the ages ... rampant commercialism.
It's the sort of apparently absurd situation a columnist could skewer.
Except this isn't really an oxymoron: It's a great idea.
Half of the college's potential students live in Montgomery County, but the Dublin campus was distantly inconvenient and the Christiansburg site left a lot to be desired.
At the mall, classes will occur where the students already are. Recent high school graduates looking to ease into higher education before heading off to a four-year university and adults looking to learn new job skills will find the resources they need close to home.
"We're taking our college and really meeting the needs of the community," college President Jack Lewis said. "What better place to do that than a place that already has all of the amenities of the main campus?"
The college can take advantage of things like ample parking and mall security to keep costs down.
Your thoughts
- Post to the message board
- Agree or disagree? Take the poll
Drive around the back of the mall, ignore the burgeoning big-box blight across the way, and find the old movie theater. Past the doors, one enters another world.
Freshly painted walls, air conditioning and the nearly subliminal hum of electronics envelop the visitor. The mall recedes.
The school's 14 classrooms bristle with high-tech resources. Zippy computers with large flat-screen monitors will keep students connected and fuel interactive learning. The only vestiges of the old theater are two large lecture halls with front screens and digital projectors.
Classes, which started Wednesday, include many of the standards such as accounting, biology, economics, English, history and mathematics. The highlights, though, are the programs in computer-aided design, which has moved from the Dublin campus, and computer game design.
The computer gaming degree is especially welcome. The video game industry grows annually and always needs more skilled designers and programmers. Yet few schools offer the required specialized training, let alone have the specialized facilities. NRCC in Christiansburg has a chance to shine.
The college spent about $1.7 million so far furnishing and equipping the campus, and will pay $240,000 annually on its 10-year lease.
That is only half of the spending, though. The mall's owners spent another $2 million refurbishing the theater.
They had obvious reasons for investing in this deal. Vacant theaters often drag down malls. Bringing the space back online removes a potential eyesore and replaces a vacant space with daily activity.
The college will bring in upward of a thousand people on many days. Some of those students, staff and teachers will no doubt spend a few dollars in the mall. Certainly many will patronize the new food court slated to open in the fall just inside the mall from NRCC. School officials envision that area becoming a de facto cafeteria and lounge.
I asked Lewis if he thought there was anything odd about the whole thing. He prefers the word "creative."
"You never know when an idea is going to lead to something tremendously great," the school's president said, standing outside the doors of the new campus. "This event is going to change the life of our school."
When word gets out about what students have available at the mall, a lot more will want the same. There is no going back for NRCC. Montgomery County students will never settle for that run-down building on Roanoke Street again.
Trejbal is an editorial writer for The Roanoke Times based in the New River Valley bureau in Christiansburg.
