The University of Michigan’s Board of Regents has approved plans for the construction of a new Multicultural Center that will cost $10 million and occupy 20,000 square-feet on the school’s Central Campus.
The approval for a new center comes after “several years of students asking the university for an up-to-date cultural gathering place that wasn’t as far from campus as the current Trotter Multicultural Center” according to local mLive.
Well if the students asked for it, let it be done — for $10 million dollars that is.
The current Trotter Multicultural Center that is allegedly “too far” for students to gather and celebrate their multiculturalism, has been around since 1972 and was recently updated in 2014 for $300,000.
The Trotter Multicultural Center is approximately a half mile from the center of campus.
According to the current Center’s website, the purpose of the Multicultural Center is “to promote a campus and community environment in which all students can prosper academically and socially.”
Over the past year, UM student leaders met with university leaders, conducted town hall events and focus group to best establish a plan for what the new space should look like.
“That input, along with institutional knowledge of the existing multicultural center student uses, resulted in a proposal for a 20,000-square-foot facility that will both accommodate spaces from the current center and add a multipurpose room able to accommodate 300 people for banquets or conferences, and an active-learning, classroom-style configuration for 100 students. The current multicultural center encompasses 11,000 square feet,” the student’s proposal to the University Regents said.
The University has not specified when exactly the new $10 million Center will be completed, so in the meantime students who wish to talk about and celebrate Multiculturalism will have to trek to the “farther away,” recently-renovated Trotter Center.
