If you’ve driven the Kennedy Expressway this year, chances are good that you’ve spotted Northeastern Illinois University’s flashy new $27 million campus outpost, El Centro, perched above the east side of the highway at Kimball, just where the Kennedy takes a major bend. Even before the building got its gleaming fins, it was a striking sight, a big, boomerang-shaped whale of a structure looming over the traffic as if it had just landed from outer space.
Part of the answer to that question can be found in Hahs’s “Decade of Dreams” expansion plan for the university, which includes six different projects, among them a $73 million education building, currently in the design stage and funded by the state, and a yet-to-be-funded $90 million science building. The plan also calls for the addition of student housing: a set of dorms on nearby Bryn Mawr, and another on the campus itself, along Foster.
Despite the chilly intermittent rain, it had to be a rewarding moment for President Hahs, whose administration has been placed on the national American Association of University Professors censure list (for allegedly violating principles of academic freedom in a case of tenure denial), and who’s wrestled with enrollment declines over the last four years that are resulting in tuition increases and course cancellations.
One thing critics point to is a housing study done by a consulting firm, Danter Company, for the university. The consultants give a thumbs-up to the student housing project, but their data include what opponents say are some obvious red flags. As assistant professor Marcos Feldman told the NEIU board of trustees last month, Danter found that only “between 3 and 9 percent of our students can afford the housing options” that the consultants were considering.
An informal group of faculty, students, and others who oppose the Bryn Mawr project plans to stage a protest on Thursday, October 9, at 8:30 AM outside Alumni Hall on the main campus, 5500 N. Saint Louis.
