Dear Mr. Gilley:
Welcome to Knoxville. Many newcomers are surprised to discover we're much more than a college town, but there's no question we're proud of our university. I hope you like it here.
We haven't met, but I'm a UT alumnus. I go to football games—that's me, up in the upper deck, the middle-aged guy who's slightly balding. I used to work at UT, driving a delivery truck, and I still get over to campus a good deal. Sometimes a professor trusts me enough to invite me over as a guest lecturer, and I'm usually glad to help out.
I like the university. I'm sentimental, I guess, but I still think of the university as mainly the faculty and students. I was a student there 20 years ago. Since then, UT's enrollment has declined by almost 4,000—but for reasons I've never understood, the campus keeps getting bigger. In expanding, UT has destroyed a lot the things I like about my hometown.
When a volunteer called me a few months ago to inquire if my wife and I would renew our annual donation, we thought about it. It's been a good year; we had some extra cash. But we decided we just couldn't go along with it and feel good about ourselves. I don't like what UT's been doing to my city lately, and I don't want to help pay for it.
I don't know if the folks there might have told you that earlier this year there was a nice old tree-shaded house on Terrace Avenue: early '20s, brick with a slate roof, a solid, stylish house anyone would like to live in, but that nobody in the world builds anymore. There was a four-story magnolia in the yard and the biggest sassafras tree I've ever seen. Anyway, just a year ago a middle-aged married couple was living in the house. Their family had owned and lived in the place for decades. They hoped to stay there forever.
We can't show you how attractive the house is, and how pleasant it is to spend an afternoon on their slate porch, because it's not there anymore. You can't see it now because UT forced the owners out and tore down their house and trees and dug a big square dirt hole to build a parking garage to serve undergraduate dormitories.
The dormitories themselves aren't any bigger than they were when I was there, of course. There are several thousand fewer students now. It's just the parking lots that are much bigger.
There are lots of other recent examples of UT tearing up good things for no obvious good reason: a pretty old place on White Avenue, the first house built on the street, but still in good shape. UT demolished it last year without even warning anybody. It's now another parking lot. There are a few dozen casualties in all; if you're interested, I could send you a list. It's not your fault, of course.
Now, we hear, UT's making plans for a highway bridge to the Ag campus. Many of us don't understand this one at all. I don't know about you, but in my 25 years of driving in Knoxville, including my years driving an on-campus delivery truck, I've never been in a car wishing I could get from one place to the other even faster than the three or four minutes it takes now. What's it for?
I suspect the bridge will be another case of paying a lot of money for something we'll wish wasn't there. Besides spoiling part of the city's Third Creek Bike Trail, the new four-lane would also infringe on our Indian mound. It's an intact burial mound, a thousand years old. It has been here since before the Cherokee were here. It is, in fact, the single best-preserved prehistoric relic in the Knoxville metropolitan area. Ask Dr. Chapman about it. It's one of the places I recommend people see when they move here. It's quiet there, Knoxville's only good place to contemplate ancient history. A century ago, it was one of Knoxville's most famous tourist attractions; there was even a picture of it in Harper's.
The bridge planners for UT and the state apparently forgot the mound was there; their first plans called for destroying it. They promise that their amended plans don't actually damage the Indian mound much, but I don't know that building a highway beside this sacred hill is just what it needs.
I'm also very puzzled about how the bridge folds into the university's 1994 Master Plan, which I assume is still current. I was heartened to review it there in the library; it seems an uncommonly thoughtful and responsible long-range plan for the university. One of its strongest recommendations was to sharply limit automobile usage on campus.
There's no four-lane automobile bridge on that plan. Maybe I'm missing something; wouldn't that four-lane bring more cars on campus?
The students tell me they're against the bridge. The faculty is overwhelmingly against it. The community's against it. The alumni I know are against it.
The only ones who seem to be for it have been a few people in UT's administration and on the Board of Trustees. I read their words and still don't quite follow their reasoning, even though I took a year of logic at UT. Can you tell us that there is a truly good reason for a highway bridge into campus, and for the previous demolitions? I hope you'll let us know what it is; your predecessors have not.
We hear rumors that the whole thing is really just about football traffic. I'm sure they're lies. Of course they are. No responsible planner would take such an expensive, destructive step to ease traffic on only six Saturdays a year.
The official explanations for all this construction and demolition have one thing in common; they have to do with accommodating great numbers of automobiles on campus. But then, isn't that just what we're trying to prevent? As you know, many modern campuses across the nation—some of them twice the size of UTK—discourage, limit, or forbid driving on campuses. Many of these campuses are known for their academics.
We're told that the promise of an on-campus automobile in a big campus parking lot is one of UTK's biggest selling points. We alumni hope you understand how embarrassing statements like that sound to us.
When administrators speak of the necessity of expanding the campus, they most often compare UTK to its rural peers: Georgia, North Carolina, Alabama—places out in the country with a tiny college town that's mainly there for support. However, it may make more sense to compare UTK to the University of Texas at Austin. It's an example of a large Southern university that is actually in a downtown area of a real city, like UTK. UT Austin is known for its lovely, comfortable, pedestrian campus.
You may know that UT at Austin accommodates twice as many students as UTK does—on a campus only two-thirds the size of UTK's. Are Texans so much smarter than Tennesseans that we can't figure out how to use our land as well?
There's one triumph of UTK that I'm especially proud of. It's Chattanooga. That city's widely heralded international reputation as a "sustainable city" was largely guided by students and faculty of UTK's College of Architecture. Chattanooga's famous now for its commitment to sustainable growth. One part of that is wise land use, geared more to the pedestrian than the automobile, avoiding costly and unnecessary road construction. Another part is comprehensive community involvement in all major decisions.
UTK seems to have little use for those principles at home. I wonder if UTK means to preserve Knoxville as the control group in the Chattanooga experiment—an example of backwards planning to keep on hand for educational purposes.
Sincerely,
Jack Neely
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