One OU professor thinks the university should have made Ellis Hall’s maintenance a priority.
Ellis Hall is home to three departments. It provides offices and research space for over 50 faculty and classroom seats for over 1000 students each week. This building, so important to the academic mission of Ohio University, is serviced by a dilapidated heating and cooling system that, for five years now, has been subject to regular breakdowns and to weeks of overheated rooms in the summer and in the winter to weeks of rooms without heat.
If the leadership of Ohio University had made the academic mission of the university the most important thing on THEIR agenda, they would have seen to it that the problems of Ellis Hall, this critical academic building, be fixed years ago.
Instead, they allowed a situation to fester in which Ohio University's hard-working but under-resourced maintenance personnel have been forced, again and again, to devise a series of temporary fixes — not to solve the problem but merely to buy some time until the next breakdown.
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This latest breakdown of the climate system led to the cancellation of classes in Ellis Hall on Wednesday. As a result, we, the faculty in Ellis, were not able to deliver on the most important thing on OUR agenda, the teaching of our students.
We Ohio University students and faculty deserve more from our leadership.
William Owens is the chair of the Classics & World Religions department.
