Michael Swickard
“I find that the three major administrative problems on a college campus are sex for the students, athletics for the alumni and parking for the faculty.” – Clark Kerr, 1958.
Parking is always one of those interesting discussions at any university. When I first attending college at New Mexico State University back in the late 1960s I had no parking problems at all since I came to school on foot. I was not all that thrilled with being on foot but it was that or not go to college at all. You lost a lot of desirability when you called up a potential date and said you would walk over and pick them up.
In my junior year I inherited a car and “joined” the group looking for a parking space close to my classes. I went from walking 25 minutes to class to spending 30 minutes trying to find that very close parking space.
When I came back to college for my doctorate in 1993 I noticed that one professor’s face turned crimson every time he spoke about parking. “It is going to get a heck of a lot worse before it gets better,” he would say. I asked, “So, you do think it will get better?”
“No,” he said.
I was always confused by his logic. He seemed to say and then take back that the parking problems at NMSU were going to get better. He always finished his parking remarks with, “In the next couple of years we will all be hurting for certain when we want to park on this campus. I plan to retire before it gets that bad.”
And he did. He was a tenured faculty member; therefore, parking may have been far more important to him than it is to students. I found back then that my fellow students and I looked at parking with a different priority.
One day I took an unscientific poll of students in my classes. My first data gathering site was statistics class. Not surprisingly I found my fellow students were far more interested in getting through statistics than they were about talking on the subject of parking.
“So, how would you rate your experiences today in finding a parking space before class? Was it miraculous, wonderful, acceptable, slow pain or frontal lobotomy?”
They looked up nervously, “What?”
“Parking, I’m talking about parking.”
“Who cares,” they said. “I found a place. How did you get SAS to run the assignment on page 44?”
Still in the scientific mode, I decided students taking statistics were so overwhelmed with statistics anxiety (much like math anxiety) so that they could not be trusted to have opinions on parking.
So I tried my public school law class. They looked up with that same graduate student nervousness and answered, “Who cares, I found one, now what is important about Perry v. Sinderman?”
And so it went. Whenever I mentioned the parking hassles to my classmates they got this glazed look over their eyes and then immediately wanted to talk about academic matters such as trying to pass the class and ultimately graduate.
From the data I collected, I can generalize for the population of students at NMSU as a whole. My preliminary research suggests that the more students are concerned with passing courses and graduating, the less concerned they are with parking, assuming there is somewhere on the campus that they can leave their car while they fight the academic battles.
Further, the less students, staff and faculty have to do, the more they spend their free time talking about the parking problems at NMSU. When they are so bothered by the parking problems, it just shows they have too much time on their hands.
If, on the other hand, they are sufficiently stressed by just surviving the academic program, the parking hassles will not even come close to their consciousness. They will be aware for a moment that there are no convenient spaces and drive quickly to the less convenient lots, but all of the time their minds will be working on academic problems.
What bothers us like parking might be more about what else we have on our plate than anything else.
Swickard is a weekly columnist for this site. You can reach him at michael@swickard.com.