Eric Webb, Executive Director of Residence Life, Dinning Services and Wyoming Union, spoke Tuesday night about the future of the residence halls.
“We’ve been working for a couple of years to come up with a plan to replace our residence halls,” Webb said.
Residence Life has put together a 10-year plan that would include tearing down Hill and Crane Halls, as well as the Crane Dining Room in order to make room for the proposed academic village.
Webb explained that at peer schools around the region, such as Colorado State University and South Dakota State University, have more resident friendly halls, including academic villages and suite style rooms.
“We spent some time touring around our peer schools,” Webb said. “There’s a variety of housing. It meets the needs of every student. One of the problems we have is that there’s one room type.”
The UW plan would include three small residence halls, each between 200 and 250 beds, an academic village and possible college specific halls that would each have their own academic spaces and offices.
Webb said he was open to the idea of having some sort of food operation, such as a mini convenience store or dining hall, in the new halls.
“I think we would have some sort of convenience store and late night kind of food operation too as a part of that,” he said.
The suite style rooms would be based off of what was seen as CSU and the University of Northern Colorado. Described as an apartment without a kitchen, the quad style room would have two bedrooms, each with two beds and then a shared bathroom with a shared living room.
These rooms would offer more space than the current rooms in the residence halls do. Webb drew from the group’s visit to UNC as main inspiration for the suite style rooms.
“UNC is probably one of closer peer schools if you look at demographics of the student and the size of the school,” Webb said. “The inside of one of the rooms at UNC, the furniture is real modular and there’s some extra space in there. There’s no space in our rooms, the beds can go up or down, that’s it.”
Webb spoke about what help the legislature’s role in funding the 10-year plan.
“We have a lot of legislative support,” Webb said. “There’s a lot of support for a long-term loan from the state to build these halls. In theory, it’s the state investing in the state.”
Webb also addressed concerns of effects on tuition that the proposed academic village could have on students.
“We believe because we have a freshman live-in requirement, we would keep that revenue in house,” Webb said. “We do not believe the average price to live in the halls would change at all. Our goal is to not impact the cost of attendance.”
