Parking Places

A real patriot is the fellow who gets a parking ticket and rejoices that the system works.
-- Bill Vaughan

The three major administrative problems on a campus are sex for the students, athletics for the alumni, and parking for the faculty.
--Robert M. Hutchins

I love WestConn. And so it seems somehow wrong to start a blog with something that makes people as grumpy as parking issues. But I begin with it because I think that WestConn's well-known parking woes, and the failures and successes in efforts to solve them, say a great deal about this place.

First, the good news: for the most part, WestConn has now finally gotten parking right. The Fifth Street Garage is finally operational. And the WestConn parking committee, after hearing from the University Senate and other constituent groups on campus, has removed the most objectionable of the regulations imposed at the beginning of the fall 2006 semester. The "reserved parking" for administrators, department chairs, and other bigwigs on campus on the surface lots will be made available to all faculty, and the White Street garage will be available to commuter students if the Fifth Street Garage is full.

This means an end to some of the most pitiful sights of the last several months. Gone will be the sight of bedraggled professors laboriously hauling cartons of slides, maps, and library books from the White Street garage to White Hall and Warner Hall. Gone will be the line of students telling me about the epithets they were forced to hurl at the (equally pitiable) hired students who denied them parking in the White Street garage when it was completely empty. That is a relief.

Of course, the new solution will not satify everyone. Commuter students, who paid for the 5th street garage with their own money, may have a right to complain about allowing faculty to use their spaces, even after hours and on weekends. Students have already told me that their hard-won garage, paid for with their own fees, should be reserved for them, and for good reason.

And in many other ways, the bad taste in the mouth from the parking issues will linger. The ad hoc parking committee that has made, and revised, their decisions on parking consists of nine administrators, four faculty and staff members, and one student. Maribeth Amyot, WestConn's Vice President for Finance and Administration, thanked the committee for "devoting their time to assessing the best way to balance the needs of various constituents for parking." While I agree that in the end the committee did so, how could the "various constituents" really feel that their needs were being represented properly when administrators were in control of the decision? And given this situation, is it a surprise that when the original parking regulations were revealed in September 2006, the people who benefited most from those regulations were those same administrators, who, along with chairs of departments, were given specially numbered spaces on surface parking lots?

But why does this even matter? Parking is trivial and detracts from everything wonderful that students, faculty, and administration do around this place. I am reminded of the statement attributed to Henry Kissinger that academic disputes are so rancorous because the stakes are so low. But here the stakes are not as low as they seem. Parking, like funding, is an area in which the purported ideals of a university are put to the test of competing interests. It is all well and good for WestConn to discuss how much students are valued on campus, or what a wonderful faculty WestConn has, but the real test of those statements come when administrators are asked to delegate something (like funding, or parking) to faculty or students when doing so is not in their own interest. WestConn's administration elicited more goodwill than I think they know by giving up their marked spaces in the middle of the parking crisis last year, because it showed that they really believed in what they said about the importance of students and faculty. And they let all of that good feeling melt away when they arrogated to themselves most of the surface parking this year. Now, fortunately, a good solution has been reached.

Ultimately, for parking to really live up to WestConn's ideals, it should be entirely on a first-come, first-serve basis. If we really want to say that administrators, faculty, staff, and students are equal in their importance, then they should have an equal ability to find parking. Of course, there are technical reasons why such a thing is impossible. But I am glad to see that the Parking Committee has taken a step in the right direction, and I look forward in relief to the day that faculty and students will not have to show up early to arrive at their classes on time.