By Grace Cardinal, Editor-in-Chief
Manhattan University’s Research and Learning Center (RLC) will look a little emptier this semester, as it will be rented out to local charter school Atmosphere Academy for the fall, and potentially spring semesters.
This will be the second time the charter school has used the university’s amenities. In the spring of 2024, the school utilized the second floor of Hayden Hall due to renovations in their usual building.
According to Atmosphere’s mission statement on their website, “Through the creation of a highly engaging school setting, Atmosphere Academy not only prepares students to be ready for college, career, and life, but to succeed once they get there. By actively contributing to the school’s shared learning community, Atmosphere students will acquire the character, skills, and knowledge they need to think, collaborate, and lead.”
On its website, MU states its mission as providing an education, “that prepares graduates for lives of personal development, professional success, civic engagement, and service to their fellow human beings.”
From these statements, the goals of the two organizations seem to align well for a collaboration.
While students were not officially notified of the rental of RLC, they quickly recognized the adjustment when offices inhabiting the building were relocated to other spots on campus.
Analia Santana, a senior student worker in the Department of Communication, is one of the many who will be doing her job in a different location this school year due to the rental.
“I feel like we all know that the school is in really bad debt, so if renting out RLC will give us more money to pay off the bills, I say, go for it,” Santana said. “It’s a little upsetting, now that the professors have moved all the way to Miguel and the student workers are in Leo, because I did like that you get to interact with your professors, and help them out with whatever they need, but also ask questions about things going on in the comm world. So now we’re all kind of in the equipment room, and we’re just by ourselves.”
The campus did not send out a formal notification to student workers about the office relocation. As for the professors inhabiting the offices, many were given mere weeks’ notice to vacate.
“I think campus administration should have sent an email saying, RLC is now closed, due to renting,” Santana said. “I wish I found out not just through my work email, but through campus.”
Chair of the Department of Mathematics and Physics Helene Tyler, Ph.D., talked to The Quadrangle about what the move meant for her newly combined department. She explained that she was sent an email from the dean of Kakos School of Arts and Sciences Marcy Kelly in mid-June, and was then tasked with disseminating the information to her department and organizing the relocation of both offices and labs.
“Our offices were moved here,” Tyler said. “There was a meeting space where students would often get together on their own to work on math problems. We no longer have that. In addition, the computer labs were moved…those rooms are now split between Hayden and Leo. The freshman physics courses had been taking place in the new labs in Higgins. We were told we needed to vacate those spaces so that electrical engineering labs could be placed in there, and the freshman physics labs are now taking place in Hayden as well.”
The rental to Atmosphere Academy was likely a result of the university’s recent financial struggles. Departments including mechanical engineering, communication, IT and more had to pack up and move to other locations on campus.
Therefore, explained Tyler, it would have been beneficial to notify professors of the change when the decision to rent was first assessed.
“The faculty and department chairs are well aware of the financial challenges that the University has been facing, and we are all committed to cooperating as best we can with the administration to move us to a better place,” Tyler said. “I wish we had been told that the administration was aggressively pursuing someone to lease the space, beginning in fall, 2024, allowing us the time to carefully prepare to move on short notice.”
The unexpected move caused some new concerns to pop up in terms of further proximity between offices that are accustomed to collaborating.
“A big concern now is how we can preserve the strong relationship that we have always enjoyed with the students and faculty from engineering,” Tyler said. “The close physical proximity between RLC and Leo made that easy. Engineering students would come by and visit us and say hello and ask for our advice after they had finished their required math courses. Now, that won’t happen. We also used to see the engineering faculty all the time in the hallways and we’d have ideas or something exciting or concerning to share about a student we had in common. I haven’t figured out how we’re going to preserve that sort of stuff, which has been one of the ways we’ve served that student population so well for so long.”
While the move may have taken campus by surprise, Tyler says it ultimately has resulted in strengthened relationships.
“I’m right down the hall from Dean Kelly, and that can’t hurt,” Tyler said. “Now that we are a merged Department of Mathematics and Physics, being all together under one roof is great. Prior to this, I had been concerned about how to bring the two halves of our department together into a cohesive whole if we weren’t going to be able to see each other on a regular basis. I can already see it helping our department…now that we’re in the new space, we’re finding things to love about it.”
The Office of the President, along with senior staff at the university, declined to provide a comment.