As Reno grows, things change for UNR
It’s changed.
This university. This city.
Maybe it’s the blue ribbons that still flap in the wind. Thousands of them, reminding us to think about that smiling 19-year-old woman and the monster responsible for her early death.
Maybe it’s the orange cones that line this campus. Hordes of them, reminding us that this university finally deserves a world-class student union and library.
Or maybe it’s downtown. Dirty, downtown Reno. The only difference being it’s not that dirty anymore. People write about it now – in magazines like Esquire. They’re not making fun of it.
“It’s ruddy and rock hard, self-evident and openhearted,” Tom Chiarella writes of Reno in Esquire. “Reno is of a whole. It is a city, not an event.”
Reno has changed. So has this university. Right under everyone’s noses despite all that glitz and glamour of that event down south.
We’re no longer a small town, nor a small university, tucked away at the foot of the Sierra Nevadas.
Students have been talking about change for decades.
Paul Strickland wrote about it in the 1979 Artemisia.
“Students were annoyed by air pollution, and they were imperiled by serious crime which reached even into the university campus,” Strickland wrote. “Students wondered whether it might soon become just another sterile, overly bureaucratic multiversity.”
In some ways our university has lost some of that charm Strickland alludes to. The university’s administration is more prone to protect us than ever before. From hazing. From drinking. From getting out of hand.
They probably know no matter how many rules they enforce this is still a university at the end of the day. Students will be students – they should just remember to be safe.
Reno is finally growing up. This university isn’t far behind.
We have big city problems and even bigger goals.
We want so badly to be an ESPN darling. We want so badly to be like those schools where people dress up in funny costumes at football games.
But what we need is a community. Next to the university. What we need is personality near our campus and people enjoying it. Restaurants. Bars. Shops.
Stickland might have seen a university on the decline. But this city and its school has much more growing up to do.
There’s nothing wrong with a little change.
Good luck,
Brian Duggan
Editor in chief, 2007-2008
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May 6th, 2008 at 9:53 am
Great job this year Sagebrush! Especially Brian, you really took this paper to the next level. Good luck!