The problem with UAH (Huntsville, Auburn: school, university, tax)

[NoleFanHSV]

I'll agree with the OP on the bar thing.

When I was living in Jacksonville, FL, we had UNF. It had about 10,000 students and was predominantly a commuter/regional school. Granted, at that time Jacksonville was about 800K strong vs our 250K, but there was a student life there and a few bars/nightclubs within the general area. Most of the kids there lived in Jacksonville, Fernandina, Orange Park, and some of the other smaller communities in and around Jacksonville. Most though lived in Jacksonville.

When I went to UAH, while there was a good portion of students living in Huntsville, I found myself taking classes with people who lived, in some cases, 75 miles in and around the school and drove to and from UAH. What that means is that they are not spending all their time in Huntsville. The only way UAH could support bars or night clubs around UAH is if more students from Huntsville were going to UAH. While there are plenty of those, the expectation I think going in also is that there isn't any bars/clubs to go to so its not a demand.

UAH forcing UAH students to stay on campus won't work and hasn't. There's just too much pushback because of cost. I do think that if a few nice bars opened up around UAH, I think there's enough locally to support those bars.

The problem is though that the location, IMHO, of UAH, simply sucks. It's not entirely UAHs fault, but I do think there has been poor planning by the city in the past to include UAH into the city plan. UNF, for example, is very close to nice shopping areas, bars, and nice apartments. UAH on one side has a Research Park, on the other side is 565, and on two other sides are basically crappy areas.

[Southlander]

Forcing UAH students to stay on campus?
Most UAH students I've known have jobs, and not on campus. Many - not all, though - have lived at home and commuted.
Since when did bars = "culture?"
When the majority of the student body cannot legally drink, why would someone invest in a bar near campus? Who's going to drink there? The homeless?

[Dirt Grinder]

Originally Posted by Southlander

...When the majority of the student body cannot legally drink, why would someone invest in a bar near campus? Who's going to drink there? The homeless?

Hey - hey - hey - let's not use common sense here.

[pistoG]

Well, it appears that everyone wants to talk about me. Which is fine, I don't mind talking about myself.

Thanks for the person who said I wasn't bragging about the salary at the company I worked for as a writer. I wasn't. But man, money in the mid 40s is a lot of money to me! I think I lived on about 15000 a year in graduate school.

I am actually a very deeply religious person. That's partly why I study philosophy. I study John Dewey and American pragmatism. I also majored in religion.

Now, are you people denying that racial politics existed in Alabama in the 1950s and 1960s? Can you really see the space program drawing engineers from a historically black college in the 50s and 60s? This is when Bull Connor was in office in Birmingham who brutalized blacks with his political power, the bombings of several black churches, the selma march to montgomery, the sit ins in restaurants, the KKK? Do you people really mean to suggest that Alabama A&M was not the most suitable place for them to focus attention on for talent and engineering resources when Marshall Space Flight was started up? It would have never happened. They would never have built the engineering program up at A&M. I'm just saying, that is why UAH is what it is today. Est. 1950. Space program started 1958. BILLIONS of dollars spent. You're saying that sixty years later there is a top of the line engineering program at UAH? That hardly ever happens. No, it had top of the line engineering program from day ONE. It's not a conspiracy theory. It's just the way things were back in the 1960s. I'm not judging it. I'm not saying its a racist institution.

Everyone goes to college to get a degree, but certainly the student culture, life style, and the university's cultural, social and spiritual options are very, very important to one's choice of schools. I'm just saying there isn't much at UAH and it really hurts the city, I think. I've got my sights set on Fordham's philosophy program for my next step and I can't wait to get these loans paid off so I can get outta here and get to a city with more for younger folk.

Oh, I found UAH's newspaper. The students there aren't very aware of it, because I asked about a newspaper on campus. There is no print edition. The Charger Times : The student news site of The University of Alabama in Huntsville Maybe I will write an oped for them.

[FatTails]

Well, I am not from here but I've heard good things about UAH. They are one of the few universities in the country with a Modeling & Simulation degree and contrary to what the OP has said, this field is the future, especially with budget cuts every year. I have heard they were pretty terrible in the past for listening to what the local industry wanted but have since changed their tune and now tailor the curriculum to what is in demand. I work for the government so salary is obviously not my top priority, but I have heard some decent starting salaries for graduating engineers.

As for philosophy... I can't believe we still subsidize tuition and hand out federal loans for that.

[pistoG]

Here ya go everyone, if I am vindicated or proven wrong, here is the history:

http://history.msfc.nasa.gov/book/chptfour.pdf

[pistoG]

Originally Posted by nerdtron

As for philosophy... I can't believe we still subsidize tuition and hand out federal loans for that.

Really? Really? Give me an engineer who can actually tell me what mathematics is. What is mathematics? What makes science special? I mean, what REALLY makes it special? Not broscience BS. Why does it work? Why did it appear when it did in human history? What is technology? What does the nature of technology tell us about human experience and nature as a whole? What does it tell us about its proper use and control?

I study these questions and Dewey wrote a book called _Logic: The Theory of Inquiry_ that contains the most detailed and robust philosophy of science and arguably also mathematics in the history of thought. That is why when I go to these interviews with these engineers and builders and business people, I speak their language better than they do. IF you have ever been concerned with questions about business ethics or the ethics of scientific research, the role of business in environmental sustainability and social welfare and responsibility, the nature of a corporation and if it qualifies as a "person," the nature of democracy and bureaucracy, or the reasons why we think that government should have controls about who it hires and what it pays you, the nature of education and the way that children should be educated in a classroom, or if they should be educated with tax money, or if they should be educated at all, you have dealt in philosophy. Please.

[pistoG]

Page 15 of my link:

Von Braun also promoted education, especially university education. He recognized that Huntsville needed high quality academic and research institutions
to attract and retain skilled people and to maintain NASA’s investment. There-
fore von Braun said his goal was to help Alabama get the nation’s “Number 1
educational center for rocket and space technology” just as it had the “Number 1” football and rocket teams. He lobbied the state to upgrade the Huntsville Extension Center of the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa. In 1961 von Braun successfully appealed to the Alabama legislature for a $3 million bond issue to create a research institute on the extension Center’s campus. With Marshall’s support, the Center extended its graduate offerings and in 1966 be- came the University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH), an independent campus in the Alabama system. UAH specialized in science and engineering and soon had millions of dollars in NASA contracts.

[AuburnAL]

Originally Posted by pistoG

Page 15 of my link:

I have often thought that the state would be much better off if UAH and A&M as well Alabama State, AUM, and TSUM combined into two schools. The budgets could be cut while more money could be spent on improving each university. I also realize that this would be a hard sell to the black and white people, and it certainly would have been much harder in the early 60s when many white people would see it as some covert federal effort at integration while many black people would see it as white people simply coming in and taking an HBCU.

The HBCUs are probably the only popular vestige of segregation in the US, ands they have survived in this limbo because they were one part of Jim Crow that was ostensibly started with good intentions and were well regarded by black people. I think it may well be another generation or two before people will recognize and be ready to deal with this.

[pistoG]

A very interesting comment. Note that the chapter of that history link states that A&M had some kind of regulations that wouldn't let whites come and teach there or something or another. I still think that more could have been done to make A&M the center of education for Marshall despite that stuff. They said that their facilities weren't quite what they were looking for but, I mean, it has to be easier to augment what is currently existing rather than go ahead and build an entire program from the ground up. It was pretty much stated in the history piece that Von Braun had a lot of clout and didn't really try to integrate with blacks, hence the extremely (extremely) low employment rates by the space center.

Originally Posted by AuburnAL

I have often thought that the state would be much better off if UAH and A&M as well Alabama State, AUM, and TSUM combined into two schools. The budgets could be cut while more money could be spent on improving each university. I also realize that this would be a hard sell to the black and white people, and it certainly would have been much harder in the early 60s when many white people would see it as some covert federal effort at integration while many black people would see it as white people simply coming in and taking an HBCU.

The HBCUs are probably the only popular vestige of segregation in the US, ands they have survived in this limbo because they were one part of Jim Crow that was ostensibly started with good intentions and were well regarded by black people. I think it may well be another generation or two before people will recognize and be ready to deal with this.

I would also just like to say that the remark that I was "probably black" or that I was posting what I was posting because I was black or whatever is probably the most racist thing in this entire thread.