You will hear a student representative explaining the views of the student body about how a large donation to the school should be spent. First you have some time to look at questions 31 to 40. Now listen carefully and answer questions 31 to 40.
Thank you Mr Chairman for asking the student body about the recent large donation to our school and what it should be spent on. Also, thank you to the rest of the Board of Trustees for letting us have some say over how to improve our university. We know that sometimes students and administration have different priorities regarding the development of the school, but we hope you sincerely consider some of the ideas that are proposed.
When the estate of Paul A. Modrib announced that he had left over $50 million to the school, the whole community was quite ecstatic and very grateful for such a generous gift. Since the initial euphoria has passed though, we have all realised that some tough decisions have to be made. The donation can help fund new projects for the school or improve existing facilities and programmes, but there is not enough money to pay for every single idea.
That is why the University Senate, through an online survey, asked the student body what ideas they thought were best. The first part of this survey consisted of an open question. Students could list any number of different ideas.
The results were then compiled in order to do a second online survey. Ideas that were totally impossible or those that were jokes were taken out. All the ideas that consistently came up again and again were put to a vote.
We found that the four things that came up the most were all pretty different. I will mention them briefly before going over the pros and cons of each of them. In the first part of the survey, we saw over and over again that students wanted to improve the residential dormitories, completely redo the campus dining system, remodel the athletics building and finally increase funding for research projects and grants, especially for those in science.
Obviously, there is not enough money from the donation to pay for all those ideas, so we have to prioritise. The ideas that got the most votes were improving the residential dormitories and completely redoing the campus dining system. They both got 30% and 28% respectively of students saying that was what most of the money should be spent on.
Many of the dorm facilities are quite old and definitely need some repair, particularly the shared bathrooms. Also, students have been complaining for a while that there is not an adequate number of dining facilities on campus and that the quality of the food at existing places is low. Spending most of the donation in these areas would definitely improve the quality of life on campus.
However, a significant minority of the student population, about 40%, does not live on campus. They commute from their homes elsewhere and therefore would not benefit from those improvements. 25% of students thought improving the athletics building was the best use of the money and 17% voted for giving money to research projects for science.
There are many people who are attracted to our university because of our athletics programmes, so improving the building would improve the reputation of the university. Only a small percentage of students actually ever use the athletics building, however. Though it received the fewest votes, giving money to university research projects has great potential.
Any new patents that come about because of that research can possibly earn the school lots of money. That is the end of section 4. You now have half a minute to check your answers.