Clock tower is a sign of new times at UALR
Posted on Tuesday, July 18, 2006
London has Big Ben. The University of Arkansas at Fayetteville has Old Main.
Now the University of Arkansas at Little Rock — the state’s second largest university with about 11, 900 students — has a clock tower to call its own.
On a hot, cloudless Monday morning without even a hint of lightning to send someone back to the future, crewmen from Baldwin & Shell Construction Co. in Little Rock installed the clock in the 55-foot tower.
The new clock tower is the most prominent feature of a $ 16. 5 million complex of campus apartments that will more than double the number of beds at UALR from 306 to 632. Since it was first chartered in 1927 as Little Rock Junior College, UALR has been almost exclusively a commuter campus. With the opening of the new campus residences set for Aug. 19, that’s beginning to change.
“We believe that having more students live on campus truly enhances our campus,” said Debbie Gentry, UALR’s director of housing. “Students who live on campus tend to be more engaged in social activities as well as academics.”
One thing is certain: UALR’s campus apartments won’t be your big sister’s dorm room.
While the typical dorm once featured a couple of bunks and possibly a minifridge, each UALR apartment will have either two or four private bedrooms — each outfitted with a full-size bed, a telephone line, cable hookup and Internet access.
The apartments also will each have a shared living area, one or two bathrooms, a washer and dryer and a full kitchen with a refrigerator, stove, microwave and a small bar for eating.
Such amenities are neces- sary to attract today’s students to residential life, Gentry said.
“When we had focus groups to ask what students want, the number one thing students told us was privacy; the number two was a full-sized bed,” she said. “We’ve found that students say the same thing nationwide.”
The apartments with four bedrooms are about 1, 035 square feet and will cost $ 500 each month per student, and the two-bedroom apartments are about 700 square feet and will cost each student $ 550 a month. That price includes all utilities, cable, Internet access and the installation of the telephone line, Gentry said.
Even before they open, the apartments are at 90 percent occupancy, Gentry said. The coed apartments are open mainly to upperclassmen or graduate students who must have a minimum of a 2. 0-grade point average and not be on disciplinary probation. Freshmen who have received UALR’s Donaghey and CyberCollege scholarships also can live in the apartments.
Other students can live across a walkway from the apartments in the coed residence hall built 14 years ago along the campus’s eastern border on Fair Park Boulevard.
The residence hall, which Gentry describes as “state of the art for 1992,” features twobedroom suites that accommodate four students. The suite includes a shared kitchenette and bathroom and costs $ 1, 550 per semester.
“We want most first-time freshmen to be assigned to the residence hall so they learn to share living accommodations,” Gentry said.
But all students who live in the residence hall or the two new apartment buildings, located to the hall’s north and south, will have access to the University Commons, the central building where the clock tower is located.
The University Commons already boasts a fireplace and space for a sizable convenience store from which students will be able to order pizza or chicken baskets. The commons area also will have a computer lab, office space and a media room with a 110-inch television screen.
The University Commons is set to open in late August. At that point, Gentry said she and her staff plan to program the 23-bell clock carillon with the tunes it will chime.
She likens the space to a student center for those who live on campus.
Members of the campus’s Residence Hall Association are excited about moving into new digs.
“The stove is the big thing,” said Justin Green, a rising sophomore from Little Rock.
“We’ve only been able to have a microwave and toaster before now.”
Green, who said he also looks forward to having his own bedroom, said his Donaghey scholarship makes up for the difference in cost between his current suite and the two-bedroom apartment.
The new campus apartments are the first step in the campus’s 2005 master plan.
Also planned are five more campus apartment buildings, each with about 100 beds, near Coleman Creek.
That will bring the number of beds on campus to nearly 10 percent of the student body, Gentry said.
But even with more student housing, Joan Duffy, UALR’s spokesman, said she expects UALR will remain a metropolitan university, which serves students mainly from a sevencounty area.
“We’re not a typical ivory tower where people come to sit under a tree and think,” she said. “We are a doer university. We harness the intellectual power of the university — the students and the faculty — and we use it to support the larger community.”
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