In which the University demonstrates that permission to park and the ability to park are two different things.
Dearest Reader,
There are many ways to discern one’s station in polite society. In Regency-era England, one might have examined a gentleman’s carriage, his country estate, or the quality of his waistcoat. At Tennessee Tech, the matter is considerably simpler: Where did you park?
Nowhere is the University’s social order displayed more elegantly than upon its asphalt. There are spaces for students, spaces for employees, spaces shared by both, and then those coveted rectangles bearing that most aristocratic of words: RESERVED. One needn’t consult an organizational chart. The Derryberry parking lot will explain everything.
The Student Season
Students have already paid handsomely for the opportunity to attend Tennessee Tech. Tuition, mandatory fees, housing, meal plans, books. Higher education is not an inexpensive invitation to receive. This year, the University has added a $100-per-semester transportation charge, after which students who bring an automobile to campus may obtain a parking permit at no additional cost.
But there has been another important change. The old distinctions among student parking areas, including separate parking arrangements for students living on campus and those commuting to campus, have largely disappeared. All students now share the same Purple parking inventory. The commuter arriving from Crossville for mid-morning classes and the residence hall student who merely wishes to leave campus for groceries or a job are, upon their return, searching among the same spaces.
Thus, the University has inadvertently introduced a fascinating new incentive: Once you find a parking space, do not move.
Need groceries? Consider fasting. Have an off-campus job? Perhaps your employer will understand. Wish to take your beloved on a proper date? How reckless. Courtship is all very well, but surely no romance is worth sacrificing a perfectly good parking space.
This is a peculiar arrangement for students who have paid thousands of dollars for the opportunity to attend Tennessee Tech. A student should reasonably be able to leave campus to work, shop, attend an appointment, or simply live a life, and return without wondering whether surrendering a parking space was an irreversible strategic error.
One must admire a university that teaches students to seize opportunities, pursue their ambitions, and above all, never relinquish a parking space.
The Gold Standard
Employees enjoy an even more distinguished arrangement. The University reports approximately 750 Gold spaces specifically designated for employees, although employees may also compete with students for Purple spaces. For access to this abundance, employees pay $280 to $310 every year.
Thus begins the daily Gold Lot Cotillion. One circles. A brake light appears. Hope rises. Another automobile approaches from the opposite direction. Eyes meet. Everyone understands what is at stake. Then, the occupant of the coveted vehicle places a coffee cup inside, retrieves a folder, locks the door, and returns to the building.
Scandal.
The disappointed employees begin another circuit, contemplating one of the greatest subtleties of high education: the University has sold you a $280-$310 parking permit. What it has not sold you, apparently, is the quaint expectation that you might actually be able to park at your place of employment. The permit grants you permission to search. The actual parking space is a matter of aristocratic favor, divine intervention, and being in the right place at precisely the right moment.
Rank Hath Its Privileges
Fortunately, not everyone must participate equally in these morning festivities. There exist upon campus those magical rectangles known as Reserved Spaces, where the uncertainties confronting the common motorist mysteriously disappear.
The reasoning is understandable. Presidents, vice presidents, and deans are busy people. Their meetings begin at particular times, their work is important, and spending twenty minutes circling or waiting for a shuttle would be an inefficient use of their day.
Quite so.
Your correspondent merely wonders when those characteristics ceased to describe everyone else who works here.
There is also a practical difficulty with governing from the Reserved Space: the parking system probably looks rather good from the Derryberry vantage point. A leader who arrives each morning knowing where the car will go does not circle, watch the clock, abandon one lot for another, or hurry across campus toward an obligation that began three minutes ago. There is value in experiencing the institution one governs as the people who work and pay to study there experience it.
A Modest Proposal
Perhaps the University is beginning to hear the concern. After weeks of questions and requests for relief, the President has now addressed the parking situation in an email sent three days before the University Board meeting. Timing, as they say, is everything. And so, with that encouraging development, let us return to the small matter of what students and employees are supposed to do now.
Students, you paid handsomely for the opportunity to attend Tennessee Tech. You deserve solutions that exist in the present tense. An additional 120 spaces for 10,773 students is not quite the triumph the administration would have us believe. A parking garage in 2028 may someday be wonderful, but sadly, neither concrete nor architectural renderings will get you to your calculus exam tomorrow morning. In the meantime, students trek across campus after dark and cross busy Willow Avenue because apparently pedestrian traffic is now part of the transportation plan. Ask SGA and University leadership for solutions that exist now. Ask that students who have paid thousands of additional dollars to live on campus have designated parking close to their residence halls. Ask for it over Fall Break, not at some unspecified point in the glorious future. Ask that the University pursue partnerships with neighboring properties to create additional parking. And when someone offers you another future solution, remember: a future solution is not a current solution. It is a Powerpoint slide.
Faculty, perhaps it is time to stop donating unlimited quantities of goodwill to an institution that charges employees hundreds of dollars for the privilege of hunting for somewhere to perform their jobs. Fulfill your required duties, certainly. Teach classes. Hold office hours. Attend the meetings and events that are actually part of your responsibilities. But another Saturday Preview Day? Another one-on-one tour for a prospective student? Another outreach event on a weekday when you have already given the University a full day’s labor? Perhaps not. Goodwill is a wonderful thing. Like parking spaces, however, it is apparently in limited supply.
And, staff, watch the clock. If the only reliable way to find parking at your job is to arrive at 7:30am for a workday that begins at 8:00am, do not quietly transform a parking shortage into free labor for the University. If you begin working early because parking requires it, record the time to which you are entitled under University policy and applicable wage-and-hour rules. Thirty minutes a day is two and a half hours a week, and the parking problem should not be solved by employees donating their time.
And finally, Administration, since Good to Great is a new beloved book amongst University leadership, perhaps we might try some of Collins’ inconvenient bit about confronting the brutal facts. Not the facts as discussed around a conference table in the President’s Cabinet, where, if campus whispers are to be believed, the consensus is that there really isn’t much of a parking problem at all. Not the facts after the garage materializes. The facts now. Better still, demonstrate a little Level 5 humility and surrender the Reserved Space. Park with your employees. Circle Gold before giving up. Park and cross Willow. Take the shuttle. Live the policy before explaining how well it works.
After all, Dearest Reader, it is remarkably easy to conclude that there is no parking problem when the parking space is already reserved for you.
