In the last decade, Macalester has devoted itself to improving and maintaining academic excellence. The teacher to student ratio has been reduced from 17:1 to 10:1 in 15 years. Many students are attracted to the small liberal arts environment that puts a premium on teaching and ensuring easy access to professors. The college prides itself on its small classes and the individual attention that students receive, but these values have not been translated into classroom settings.

Though some classrooms offer long tables, which facilitate the discussion that is so important to this college, most rooms still have antiquated individual desks with an attached mini-desktop. Perhaps these desks would suit a school who was orientated around traditional lecture sessions, but here they inhibit Macalester’s seminar-style classes, which are based on group discussions.

There is no question that what makes classes here worthwhile, enjoyable, and inspiring are the professors. They are the ones who foster critical thinking and bring out students’ strengths. However, a typical Macalester classroom,which features old-fashioned desks, bare, white, boring walls and an excess of electronics, does not make for a livable, comfortable and suitable environment where our generations of Einsteins and Foucaults can be properly nurtured.

What we want are walls covered with student art, not the Kaplan GRE advertisement, and Texas A&M Bush School of Policy propaganda that people hardly even look at. There is so little space for public art displays and student expressions at Macalester that it seems like a shame not to utilize these spaces available in classrooms.

We want furniture that is more conducive to group discussions, not the individual cubicle-style desk-chairs that take up too much room to fit twenty students in a classroom and are too small for most average-sized people to sit on comfortably.

A number of professors have students move these awkward desks into an attempted circle formation in order to make discussions easier (always helps when you can see the person to whom you are speaking). Wouldn’t it be nice if this moving wasn’t necessary? The classrooms should be ready to go, moving chairs around and other extraneous preparation just takes precious class time away.

Our point is this: We want more classes that are like senior seminars. Small classes (although there seem to be numerous seminars with more than twenty students), interested kids, fascinating material and lots of listening and talking among students. It’s a real bonding experience, a realization that your interests are not your ideas alone and a chance to learn quite a lot from our peers.

The better we can situate ourselves in a classroom, the better we can listen to each other, and the better prepared we are to talk in class-not just for the sake of getting good class participation grades, but in order to share something we care about. In other words, the better accommodated we are by the college, the better and smarter students we can become.