The Collegian Weekly: Goodbye, Knorr, goodbye
Issue date: 11/29/07 Section: Opinion
The Knorr Center is a place of things unnoticed. It is posters proclaiming flying lessons, offices and lounges without windows, and a 30-year-old television set rolling the same screens, day in and day out, for decades. The television was probably placed in its glass display case by a tech savant of the past, but nobody is sure; nobody turned the dial on a set so old, and few know where the set has gone - ironically removed during a cutting-edge CCA on quantum physics.
Nobody on campus knows any more about the television set than what will happen to the exposed brick walls of Knorr, or to the smoke which wafts from the snack bar in varied thickness every day.
Nobody knows if ITS will get expanded offices. Nobody knows how long Wiegand Lab will remain the student-focused lab that professors cannot reserve. Some of us wonder why Career Planning and the college chaplain's office will remain in the Knorr basement while everyone traipses to the Grewcock Student Union.
We do know things are about to change as walking patterns and campus culture shift to the new union.
We'll see less of Knorr, a building erected in 1968, which plagues Vice President of Administration Rich Pewe as part of the architectural "identity crisis" he's repairing on campus.
"It's been functional," Pewe said. "But lighting and the expanse of brick haven't been what you expect to see at Hillsdale College."
That thought might be a touch of revisionist history, because it's exactly the brick, lighting, and low ceilings which cannot be shaken from the mental image this college imprinted on the memories of upperclassmen.
Knorr is a conservative stronghold of purple and green carpet where lab assistants pose Ronald Reagan as a desktop background and where wooden snack bar chairs - some with arm rests and some without - scrape the tile in an unforgettable way.
But Pewe promises new furniture and new warmth, in time, to match Grewcock.
"You just feel like you want to be in there," he said of the union.
We'll gladly say goodbye, Knorr, goodbye.
Like the great moldy building that fell before it - Kresge Center for Traditional Studies - Knorr will linger in limbo as a pass-through similar to Indiana, the "Crossroads of America."
Until revamped, we will walk through Knorr quietly and oblivious to the antique television, the vacant apartment flyers, and most of the other decaying conservative trinkets on this campus shaking time.
Hillsdale College Collegian 2007
Nobody on campus knows any more about the television set than what will happen to the exposed brick walls of Knorr, or to the smoke which wafts from the snack bar in varied thickness every day.
Nobody knows if ITS will get expanded offices. Nobody knows how long Wiegand Lab will remain the student-focused lab that professors cannot reserve. Some of us wonder why Career Planning and the college chaplain's office will remain in the Knorr basement while everyone traipses to the Grewcock Student Union.
We do know things are about to change as walking patterns and campus culture shift to the new union.
We'll see less of Knorr, a building erected in 1968, which plagues Vice President of Administration Rich Pewe as part of the architectural "identity crisis" he's repairing on campus.
"It's been functional," Pewe said. "But lighting and the expanse of brick haven't been what you expect to see at Hillsdale College."
That thought might be a touch of revisionist history, because it's exactly the brick, lighting, and low ceilings which cannot be shaken from the mental image this college imprinted on the memories of upperclassmen.
Knorr is a conservative stronghold of purple and green carpet where lab assistants pose Ronald Reagan as a desktop background and where wooden snack bar chairs - some with arm rests and some without - scrape the tile in an unforgettable way.
But Pewe promises new furniture and new warmth, in time, to match Grewcock.
"You just feel like you want to be in there," he said of the union.
We'll gladly say goodbye, Knorr, goodbye.
Like the great moldy building that fell before it - Kresge Center for Traditional Studies - Knorr will linger in limbo as a pass-through similar to Indiana, the "Crossroads of America."
Until revamped, we will walk through Knorr quietly and oblivious to the antique television, the vacant apartment flyers, and most of the other decaying conservative trinkets on this campus shaking time.
Hillsdale College Collegian 2007
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