Two years ago, Wingate Hall was built next to Garfield Hall, adding yet another residence building to the campus. Stylistically, it looks to be a miniature version of Garfield Hall, and according to Vice President of Student Services John Marshall, it’ll eventually be expanded to mirror Garfield’s horseshoe shape where it stands.
When I started out as a freshman, Escalante was in its second full year of use and the Tomlinson Library wouldn’t be open until the end of that November, mere days before the end of the fall semester. After that, Wingate Hall came along. Now we have Confluence Hall, and by January of 2020, we’ll have the CMU hotel.
As a freshman, I noted how Escalante was the newest building on the CMU campus. Now, I’m a senior, and it’s down to number four on the list of most recently built buildings.
In 2015, Colorado Mesa University was the quickest growing college in the state. 10,000 students were enrolled. That number has already surpassed 11,000. Colorado Mesa University was only born from Mesa State College in 2011, and it stands confidently, fooling newcomers into thinking it’s been a university for decades.
Seriously, it’s awesome to watch people’s surprise at finding that CMU is in its eighth year of actually being CMU. If there was ever a time that CMU hurried almost frantically to grow their campus fast enough to keep up with skyrocketing student enrollment, it was in the last several years.
That being said, the time of hurried expansion CMU has experienced these last few years is coming to an end.
According to Marshall, “Our growth has become a little more modest so it’s slowed down enough that it’s a little more manageable.” Basically, CMU is still growing at a satisfying rate, but the growth every year is no longer causing the stressful amount of campus construction that it once did. We went all of last semester without anything being constructed. That’s probably the first quiet semester I’ve seen since starting at CMU.
It’s not like the construction ever got in the way of my college experience. It really didn’t. I was amazed that they could always be building something – that the school was growing that fast. Apparently, I even missed the craziest construction years.
According to Marshall, “There was a point on this campus when we had Wubben Science, the University Center and North Avenue residence hall all under construction at the same time.”
Still, deep evaluations on where to expand and with which facilities to expand will continue. According to the Daily Sentinel, CMU’s wish list consists of improved health sciences facilities, a new student parking garage, a new electrical and computer engineering building and an expansion of both the kinesiology facilities and Moss Performing Arts.
Where will these things go? I’m not so sure we’re supposed to know yet. Surely, nothing’s set in stone and the plans aren’t super detailed. People still own those houses on Bunting Avenue, though, and the rest of campus is pretty packed full of buildings, sports fields and other necessary facilities. The parking garage could perhaps take the place of the empty Albertson’s parking lot.
CMU will certainly continue to grow into the foreseeable future. The rate of growth will slow down, but it may not happen before CMU’s race against time becomes a race against space across which they can expand in a practical way.
Construction is always a war against something. Surely, CMU has a detailed long-term plan, and I, as a student, am really beginning to wonder where this campus is going, and when.
