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Show Worth Much? "Is this the same place I knew 18 years ago?" a prosperous alum asked us earlier this week. "I can't even find my way around the torn-up campus anymore." Admittedly there have been some changes on campus: Forty-one buildings have been torn down since last spring. A $60 million building program is underway. The studentbody has quadrupled in the last 15 years. The administration can no longer make do with only half a dozen vice presidents. Yet for all this there are some things that will never change. Most students here still live at home. They come five minutes early to school, spend ten minutes looking for a parking park-ing place, then dash back home to study. Dorm dewllers, on the other hand, stay around to make life on the University campus bearable 24 hours a day. The vocal left also stays on after class but to protest and up-date. Clean-cut student officers use their miniscule mandates to improve student life. They dream, organize, execute, then dream again. Medical and law students live in a world of wives and kids, cadavers and torts a transitional world with only weak ties to the undergraduates. And, of course, the Greeks persist. "Nevertheless," the alum concluded, "The 'U' has changed plenty. Where's the nostalgia? What is there left to jog those college memories?" On the surface only pep songs seem the same, yet one vital thing remains constant: The traditional 'U' freedom to select from the University's myriad offerings, curricular and otherwise, those ideas and activities which will eventually produce pro-duce the man that walks up a crowded aisle to receive his diploma. The University of Utah created the atmosphere and suggested the alternatives which in a way determined some of your life's most far-reaching decisions. Aren't alums still tied to many of those decisions that the University helped make: tied to the friends gained, the principles prin-ciples learned, the mistakes made, the sheepskin earned, the wife met and the profession entered? Sometimes it's too easy to forget about the efforts of professors, the administration and the state in your behalf. "Hmmmm," said the alum. "Maybe I do owe the U a little after all." Perhaps even more than a little. The University must piece together more than 50 of its budget from handouts. At present pres-ent the U's 90,000 alums contribute something over $300,000 yearly an average of under $3.50 per graduate. How much is an education worth? |