The Kansas Board of Regents has been a busy little bunch lately. The board has given the green light to $120 million worth of construction projects and is looking to increase on-campus living costs. Oh ya, they’re also proposing a review process for tenured university faculty too, but we’ll touch on that one later.
Three new construction projects have been passed which include a School of Business building, a basketball museum and two new residence halls.
The business building is projected to cost $66 million but thanks to a huge donation by the Capitol Federal Savings of Tennessee, only $44 million in bonds and donations will be needed.
The Allen Fieldhouse will sport a new building named, the “Rules of Basket Ball”, which will serve as a basketball history museum and showcase James Naismith’s original rules of basketball. Seriously, the original rules of basketball! Naismith is credited as the creator of the sport and then later went on to coach the University of Kansas basketball team from 1898 to 1907.
David Booth, billionaire and philanthropist, purchased the historic documents from the Naismith family in an auction for $4.3 million. Booth went on to say he would donate them to the University of Kansas, Naismith’s home school, if they would erect a new building to permanently display the artifact.
The university got a fantastic deal of only having to spend $18 million on a building to receive the $4 million piece of memorabilia. For the same price, I would have bought the rules of basketball and then stored it in the glove compartment of a car crushing robot made of Bugatti Veyrons. How much cooler would that be?
Finally, two new student residence buildings are to be constructed to replace the aging McCollum Hall. The current residence hall, which looks more like Pruitt-Igoe than a place for academic learning, won’t be demolished until the new buildings are completed sometime in 2014.
Students planning to live on campus in fall 2013 will get a nice little mint on their pillows along with a 2.5% increase on room and board. There is just one downside, there is no mint. Director of student housing, Diana Robertson, attributes the increase to a rise in operating expenses and utilities.
“Each year we take a look at what the rates for the following year are going to need to be,” Robertson said. “With utilities, for example, we’re expecting a 4 to 6 percent increase in costs. That makes up a significant amount of our budget, so we have to plan accordingly.”
Besides the initial construction, the maintenance and operation of student residences are entirely funded by rental income and the same goes for food services. While increases never sound like a good thing, the bump for the average student living full time on campus including food will be less than $200 dollars a year. Far less than the cost of the average kegger.