Fame, the Master Plan and Moeser

In a recent Daily Tar Heel, there was a "help wanted" ad to find next semester's columnists. It said a columnist was a "campus celebrity." I can speak from personal experience - if by "campus celebrity" they mean poor grades and bitter loneliness, they are right on target.

This got me thinking about the idea of celebrity. When British Ambassador Sir Christopher Meyer came to campus earlier this week, he was introduced as "Saint Meyer." Ah, celebrity.

But if you heard the ambassador speak, you will also know that Students United for a Responsible Global Environment, who must apparently be atheists, gave the saint/ambassador a hard time about Iraqi sanctions. Ah, celebrity.

People seem to assume that because someone is a celebrity, they are put on a pedestal, they are canonized and they are given qualities only Roberto Clemente and Zeus had. They have all the answers, they are really holy, really superhuman and really cool. And along with that comes the baggage. People will still assume these "celebs" are the ones who really make the bad decisions, the real fat cats.

While I am not a celebrity, not even a campus celebrity, I did have the chance to speak to an authentic one when I sat down with Chancellor James Moeser. We talked about the Master Plan, which in a short sense is an attempt to create this dual sense of new and old at the University. New, with new buildings, putting the "North Campus" feeling onto South Campus. Old, putting the old "traditional" feeling of North Campus onto South Campus. Chancellor Moeser noted, "The walk from Hinton James to South Road, is the same length as the walk from Franklin Street to the Student Union. It is the quality of the walk that is different."

Chancellor Moeser has a point. North Campus has names: Polk Place, McCorkle Place, the Pit. South Campus and Mid Campus? No names. There is a stadium, some residence halls, but no name, no real sense of community.

The plan, according to the chancellor, is to change all of this. New low-rise residence halls will be added to South Campus, Chase Hall will become a student services building and the Ramshead parking lot will become a student center. When the dust settles, there will be 20 less acres of concrete on campus.

But all of this work is not going unnoticed. In Hinton James, for example, where the fence often ends up being torn down, there seems to be a game of chicken between it and the students, a battle to see who will be the last one standing. My friend Jim has grown jaded by it all. He says to me, "Will, you guys in Ehringhaus have it good. Not only do I have to walk around our fence, I have to walk around your fence as well."

That may sound petty to you folks who do not wake up overlooking a construction site, but it does impact these kids' walk to class. Tearing down the fence in front of HoJo is indicative of the "New York Minute" lifestyle on South Campus: get there as quickly as possible. "Maximizing safety" is more the goal the chancellor had in mind. Obviously, there is a conflict here.

It is a conflict between short term and long term. Short term being an all-out war of attrition on chain link fences by angry underclassmen. Long term, the University is trying to create a community - not a North, South or Mid Campus - but just one campus, so students on South Campus won't be so anxious to go.

At Chase on Tuesday night, the Master Plan developers brought some eggnog and talked to students about their ideas - and sure enough the dirt pit in front of Ehringhaus will not be a racetrack as I had bet, but one of many "low rise" residence halls. I asked Chancellor Moeser if one of these new "low rise" residence halls could be named after me? He replied, "That's a possibility." (I probably should have told him my whole name: William McKinney Is Great.)

But all this talk about renewal and sprucing up made me concerned about one of my favorite spots on campus: the Pit. While there are probably prettier spots on campus, I still think the Pit gets unfairly criticized.

"The Pit is a wonderful place. . It is the campus crossroads of our University," Chancellor Moeser said. He is right, it is the hub of the University, but people still call it an eyesore.

The Undergraduate Library is being renovated; the Student Union is losing that Kennedy administration sanitary feeling. But what is being lost is that in the Pit, more than any other place on campus, you have a real feeling of the time when those buildings were built. There is such an intense feeling of time and place in the Pit that I think the area is good to have here.

On some level, I think the Master Plan is forcing Chancellor Moeser to become a celebrity beyond what is normally expected. His position, and the incredible amount of work on campus with the Master Plan, make him the guy. The guy that is going to revitalize this University. But the guy that is going to put up construction fences around campus. While he is not "Saint" Moeser, I think that soon, when you may be tempted to wear a hard hat as an act of protest, you might remember what work is in the best interest of the University.

William McKinney would like to thank Chris Sellers and Ben Dougan for their intermittent support and unwavering criticism, without which this column would have been much worse. Reach William with questions and comments at wmckinne@email.unc.edu.