The Student Government Association held a meeting Thursday where President M. David Rudd spoke about current and upcoming projects taking place on the University of Memphis campus.
Rudd opened his talk by discussing the construction on the other side of Southern Avenue and the considerable action that would be taking place over the next few weeks.
“It’s going to take about 10 months to build the parking garage,” Rudd said. “Around month number nine or 10 is about when they should start the bridge, which will take around another 10 to 11 months to finish.”
Rudd said somewhere in the middle of all of the construction, they will start working on updating the recreation center.
Rudd also said the U of M Research Foundation Ventures, Inc., a new business partnership from the university, offers students an opportunity to work at a call center at the FedEx Institute on campus. Rudd said the call center currently employs 46 students and will grow to over 70 students more than the time of the spring and summer semesters.
“Next year, we will be hiring up to 300 students,” Rudd said. “We are going to continue to expand that because the company is going so well, and our goal ultimately is to eventually hire 1,000 students on this campus.”
The goal of the call center is to have students in a position where they can go to school with a job that caps work loads at 20 hours, preventing them from taking on too much work at once, Rudd said.
An SGA member asked Rudd for his opinion on the Tennessee House Bill about Greek life being abolished from Tennessee state campuses. Rudd replied that he did not think the bill was going to pass, but he talked about how three fraternities have had difficulty on this campus and that the university has zero tolerance for criminal behavior.
“If you want to discover how serious criminal activity on this campus is, engage in it,” Rudd said. “When you’re sitting in my office, I’m not going to give you sympathy for it. What I’m going to do is pursue criminal prosecution like I have with every other case on this campus, whether it has involved students, faculty or staff.”
Having said all of this, Rudd said fraternities and sororities are critical to community life at the U of M.
“This is an educational environment, and we are going to help educate people and do everything we can to make that happen,” Rudd said. “So I will continue to work with fraternities and sororities to make that happen but understanding that some things are just not acceptable, and they can never be acceptable.”
Near the end of the meeting, Rudd discussed how drug and alcohol abuse is causing most of the problems on campus.
“Ninety-eight percent of our problem is alcohol and drug abuse, which isn’t any different than any other campus in this country,” Rudd said. “They all struggle with some sort of alcohol abuse.”
Rudd said if someone is of legal age, it’s their decision to drink, but he does wants students to understand how to be responsible about it.
“I can’t even tell you the lives that are damaged from drug and alcohol abuse,” Rudd said. “It’s really just tragic, so we are going to be as active as we can be about it on our campus.”
Garret Barnes, speaker of the Student Government Association, addresses SGA senators about his plans for Up 'Til Dawn. This Feb. 1 meeting was the first of the spring semester and began with U of M President M. David Rudd addressing concerns of senators.
