Happy to see San Ramon buildings bite the dust
The Misanthrope by ETHAN CHATAGNIER
It’s a less than tearful goodbye I send off the San Ramon buildings with. The San Ramon 2 complex was ripped to bits last week, the first battle won in the university’s long, losing war against temporary buildings.
 Those supposedly short-term structures were built 36 years ago to help assuage student and faculty overflow. Let’s provide some context: the Berlin Wall stood for 29 years and the Great Depression spanned a decade. My parents had not met when these buildings were erected.
Pieces of the Berlin Wall have sold at auction for tens and sometimes hundreds of thousands of dollars. Though San Ramon 2 stood longer, I doubt it’s as worthwhile an investment.
The various San Ramon buildings have been universally hated. In four years at Fresno State, I cannot recall hearing a single positive thing about them. They will not be sorely missed, and it seems their replacement — a lawn — will be much more popular.
The one thing I will miss is the jokes my friends and I made about them. We would refer to them as the campus ghetto. “Don’t get knifed,” we’d tell each other, when someone was heading in that direction.
These now-homeless jokes of mine (and, often, the student body in general) will have to be redirected, much to the chagrin of the Learning Resource Center. The LRC has been located for the past year and a half in the portables on the Peters Building lawn, ever since its home in the Lab School was burned down.
Of course, the renovation and reopening of Lab School didn’t signal the downfall of the portables. Once a temporary space is designated, the university will find a way to fill it, and by the time a permanent building is built to replace it, new temporaries will be sprouting up like mushrooms.
The new joke is that the LRC trailers just need a rusted-out Chevy up on blocks in order to complete the picture. One can’t help but feel bad for the tutors and students in what looks more like a Libertarian commune than a center of learning.
Maybe the new library will have room for them. Maybe not. If not, it’ll just be a waiting game to see when the next new building goes up.
For now, it seems the university has forgotten that when they put up a temporary building, the clock is ticking. Meanwhile, I keep the tick-tock in my head to the end of the semester, when the last San Ramon buildings go down. But in a last gesture of defiance, they may take a nod at the LRC trailers as if to say, “don’t cry for me, Fresno State. The truth is I never left you.”
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