TIME NOTICE: This article was written by a student in the Journalism Fundamentals class in the 2024-2025 school year and may not reflect the most current information of the date of publication.
Eastern University is undergoing some major changes this year. These changes include the reconstruction of Eastern’s baseball field, the parking lot of Sparrowk Residence Hall and various areas near Eastern’s water wheel. While these changes are being done to improve the university, the recent construction has been disruptive to students, faculty and staff.
“Whenever I get frustrated that I can’t find a parking spot, I try to remind myself that the end goal…is that everything is going to be a little better for the students and myself,” Dr. Susannah McMonagle, Affiliate Professor of Communications Studies at Eastern, said. McMonagle is also an alumna of the university. She has been taking pictures and videos of the construction progress to share with her alumni friends. “I am thrilled about the evolution of the campus,” she said. While McMonagle has a positive outlook on the construction work, others have a few concerns and pressing questions about the work being done.
“I feel like they waited too long to do it,” Kiana Sampson, a senior at Eastern, said. “It doesn’t necessarily mess up the college experience, but all these detours [are] preventing us from wanting to go class, taking 15 extra minutes just to get from point A to B.” Sampson continued, “I understand the reason why they are doing it, but it’s kind of like [poor] time management. Over the summer they didn’t do enough construction. I was here throughout the summer and nothing was being done until the first week we got back.”
Steven Hartner is the Executive Director of Facilities at Eastern. He understands the community’s frustration but explains the university is sometimes unable to control the timeline. “Typically, what determines our start date is when permits are approved and it’s very difficult to nail down when we are allowed to start,” Hartner said. “You’ve got a budget and you’ve got the permitting process. Rarely will a single project only take three months, but we do as much as we can over the summer.” An article titled Summer Construction on College Campuses mentions the benefits of construction during the summer are less need to restrict construction sounds, better weather for quicker construction, and lower risk of pedestrian safety concerns.
“We understand accessibility over the summer and there’s a lot less disruption to the amount of people on campus,” Hartner said. “It’s a lot safer, but projects are just a lot larger than just one single season will allow.” Despite the disruption, Hartner emphasizes, “the goals of the construction work are to provide students with a better campus experience.”
“We are growing, and we are trying to keep up with the pace of growth,” Hartner said. “Our athletics program is growing, and we are committed to that growth, and to see it be successful, we need to improve our facilities.”
Stefan Martyniak is the Resident Director of Gallup Hall, which is located near the baseball field. He was a student at Eastern before he began working at the university and remembers it having fewer financial resources.
“It’s great to see the growth, but again it causes a lot of hurdles because everything is sort of taped off,” he said. “It’s just so very confusing to maneuver all those parts of the campus and it can be a bit of an eyesore. As someone who lives on campus, I can hear the construction in the morning. It’s a little bit distracting, too, if I’m being honest, and I’m sure other people feel the same way as well.”
Campus community members like Martyniak have been weighing the positives and negatives of the expansion of the campus. Hartner is aware that growth can have some downsides. He attended a recent SGA meeting where an attendee mentioned the inaccessibility of some pedestrian paths.
“With all the projects we’ve got going on…Templeton…the vehicular road and the baseball field, all of them had those paths closed down,” Hartner said. “When the university realized this, they decided to make temporary paths and/or adjust the scope of work to keep pedestrian pathways open. I think that one of the nice amenities this campus has is that it is walkable, and to remove any of the paths would be a deterrent to the overall campus experience.”
Hartner discussed the goals of the construction related to Eastern’s athletic facilities. “The baseball field, much like the gymnasium addition, which is upcoming, is just not NAACP compliant. We need to improve the field overall just to make it more NAACP-compliant. In a nutshell, it wasn’t. We couldn’t have sanctioned games there even though there were games played before. We are bringing in turf, we are bringing in a better outfield fence, we are bringing in new dugouts that will have electricity to them, and just an overall updated experience. It was an old field, and we are updating it to new codes and to provide an overall better experience.”
Sampson also expressed her concerns about parking for freshmen. “As an RA, it’s not too bad for me because I have priority parking, but I feel bad for the freshman and how they have to park their car across campus or take a detour to get to their room because of construction,” she said. “What if someone needs to go somewhere in between classes and Public Safety is not always answering their phones to come pick people up? So it’s kind of like every issue. The solution is kind of vague because it’s not prioritized,” she said.
“For the construction near Doane,” Hartner said, “what you have there is a vehicular bridge and road project, that is the precursor to the gym addition project. We are removing the pool that has since passed its life expectancy and providing an athletics area that can be competitive with other schools. [We want to] also prove the school’s commitment to those athletes and students overall that come to the campus,” Hartner said.
Hartner continued, “The baseball field we are hoping to complete by the spring. The vehicular road project should be completed by the end of May 2025. Workman Hall will be turned into Templeton, and the gym expansion project will be late fall of next year.” Students and staff have been weighing out the positives and negatives of the expansion of the campus. Hartner gave a bit of insight on the downsides of the growth and expansion of Eastern. “We are limited in our square footage on campus. It is a very small campus. We are unable to expand because we are landlocked. We have neighborhoods on all sides, and Radnor Township amongst other townships, is a very difficult township to construct in.”
To reassure students and staff whose main concern was about better communication about the construction work, Hartner stated, “We are aware of those concerns and we do our best to communicate accessibility and pathways. The biggest thing is to read emails. New generations may have different forms of media for communication, but there are email communications that go out campus-wide to notify of planned disruptions. There are planned outages and planned path closures. We certainly try to minimize it, but the best thing is to communicate alternatives, which we try to do. We understand that there may be disruptions and alternative routes, but we try and keep those down to a minimum.”