Colorado Mesa University students are petitioning for a new change, and I am 100% for it.
Last week, I saw individuals pitching tents on the most treacherous terrain in all of Colorado, the infamous Escalante Hall Stairway.
Compared to Mount Everest, the Escalante stairway is no joke, with a slope steep enough to trap individuals on their journey. This academic hall requires a big change.
Instead of spending student tuition on new dorms and cafeterias, why don’t we take a look at the real issues; a stairway that leads all the way up to the top of a third-story building with the same height as the Eiffel Tower?
Students have tried to count the number of stairs to the top of the third floor, but before they reached it, they had to take a nap and they all forgot what they were even doing in the first place. There have also been a select few incidents where individuals trying to count couldn’t make it to the top and had to be extracted from the building by rescue crews. The emergency airlift bills are astronomical.
If you’re looking to get in your daily cardio, there is no reason to go to the rec center before class; you could just run up and down the stairway a few times. That’s more than enough to get the blood pumping.
Petitions have been sent out and emailed to CMU president John Marshall, but he has yet to respond. I don’t understand why, because I thought he cared about student wellbeing.
This petition includes the proposition to replace the stairwell with an escalator, which is exactly what the university needs. The new dorms take out parking lots, and the only thing this project would take out is the embarrassment of walking up the stairs at 8 a.m. in the morning.
With the end of the spring semester less than a month away, this issue has to be solved before the stairwell scares off incoming students. With such a tiring climb, students have been known to skip out on third-floor classes due to the harsh conditions. It has become such an issue that classes such as English 112 and Mythology have had very low registration rates, and the only plausible explanation is that students do not want to have to use the stairwell.
As a mass communications major, most of my time at CMU has been spent in Escalante, and this stairwell has been the reason I have missed and been late to a lot of my classes.
Which leads me to another upside to this stairwell, the installation will lead to a quicker travel time between classes, and it would most likely lead to a decrease in tardy or absent students.
Escalante is the perfect test dummy for the new escalators. Hopefully, CMU will put escalators in all of the academic halls, especially
