FRCC To Roll Campuses Back To The 1980s

Those attending FRCC’s Westminster campus may have heard about the recent meeting held in the Rocky Mountain Room last Wednesday morning. Those in attendance would have noticed the fervor among the audience, or perhaps joined the audience in the excitement themselves. But what caused this exactly?

At this meeting, Professor Jim Carley, who started at Front Range this spring semester, announced a plan to roll back FRCC to the way it had been in the 1980’s. Carley laid out specifically what initiatives will occur at Front Range starting in the fall semester (with some initiatives starting in mid-April), using a slide projector system rather than a computer and modern projector to achieve this.

FRCC will use a newly discovered array of cathode-ray tube televisions found in a storage room on the Boulder campus in classrooms at both the Westminster and Larimer campuses, which will replace the flatscreen displays. Some content that had previously been interactive will have their lesson plans changed in favor of videotape-based plans instead, and VCRs discovered in a different, much larger storage closet on the Westminster campus will ease this transition. Additionally, the landline phones seen at FRCC will be installed in all major rooms that do not currently have them, with the IT department given a grace period of nine to 260 months to complete this.

To the shock of all in attendance, Dr. Simpson, dressed in a neon jumpsuit, Doc Martens, a puffed-up hair-do, scrunchies on her wrists and ankles, and with a presumably vintage Walkman on her pants waist, suddenly walked up to the podium and snatched the microphone from Carley. After a brief, obviously staged scuffle between the two, she said that she was excited to announce a few major changes to Front Range.

“Firstly, the Cabinet and I are extremely excited to announce that, after months of examination, we are doing away with the One College system. To account for this sudden change, we are repurposing the entire Boulder County campus into a massive one room open-plan office building for Front Range at large, considering it is the halfway point, more or less, between the Westminster and Larimer campuses. However, two classes, along with the AV club, will continue to operate out of BCC [Boulder County campus].” This erupted into applause from many of the faculty, who comprised most of those in attendance, there.

Jonathan Antonio, an instructor who teaches primarily on the Boulder County Campus, said that, “We are mostly pretty thrilled that the Boulder campus is being repurposed. A lot of us lived closer to Fort Collins or to Westminster, and that saves us a bit of a drive to get here as well as the scrambling between campuses, especially with the way the economy’s been going lately. Plus, there is still opportunity for teachers to teach classes at this campus – it has not been totally phased out.”

“I think I can speak for most of the faculty here when I say that you will be excited to hear this next point,” Simpson continued. “We will be banning any and all smartphones on campus, including flip phones. If we want to commit to this project, this is a necessary step to take.” Dr. Simpson was interrupted by immediate and raucous applause from most in the room.

“Any and all cell phones seen or heard in a classroom or anywhere on campus will be collected before being put into the back of a 1961 Ferrari, which will then be driven backwards through the windows of the Mount Antero rooftop garage. We are still allocating funds to allow the purchase and construction of such a garage,” Simpson concluded after the applause died down.

Katie Donnan, who has been working at Front Range for the past 10 years in the History Department, said, “I was very excited to learn that such harsh rules have been implemented for these stupid things [smartphones]. The students I’ve taught have been getting worse and worse with being on their phones year after year, and now we finally get to take it out of their hands and do something with it!”

Beri Haldwell, head of the Information Technology department, then promptly stunted up to the podium wearing a pair of Converse All-Stars, explaining that the student number system would not be affected, nor would files contained on certain computers. She explained that “all of this information will be reformatted for compatibility and transferred to old Commodore, MS-DOS, Apple, ZX Spectrum, and Atari computer systems. No student, staff, or campus information will be lost during this move as several hundred thousand backup floppy disks and cassettes will be used for this purpose.”

Lastly, Dr. Simpson reappeared at the podium and touted one more change to the way FRCC runs – it will no longer use D2L or be involved in the Colorado Community College system. “I know this may sound ridiculous, but D2L’s frequent outages and reliance on the stability of an Internet connection has proven hard to ask from all students. Instead, going forward, all assignments will be submitted through 300 baud teletypes.”

After the meeting, a faculty member, who chose to remain anonymous, expressed relief at the dissolution of the One College system, exclaimed “Well, for a second there, I really had thought that Front Range had fallen from their graces compared to the last 15 years I’ve spent as the Head of the Math Department here at Front Range. But now it’s really nice to know that Dr. Simpson and her Cabinet have gotten their heads out of you-know-where!”

Carley explained that the plan had come to fruition from a meeting with Dr. Simpson, where he
“had been instructed in this college-wide conference call to come up with something. We got put into certain breakout groups, came up with and agreed on an idea for like an hour, and then we came back, suggested our ideas, and voted. The 80’s plan had gotten the most votes by far, with 53 or something like that. The runner-up had only two votes.”

Later, Dr. Simpson explained in an email that the One College system had been “very inefficient and just this massive headache for all involved. If anything, the 1980’s program was a pretty efficient way to tackle that issue. We have taken into consideration all the viewpoints of faculty, other staff, and students into this, and we believe that the One College system needs to be discontinued.”

“We think that rolling back the largest community college in Colorado will provide plenty of interest in college students, who think they must see this college’s 80’s program to believe it.” Jan Enelle, a member of the President’s Cabinet, explained. “Additionally, much of our infrastructure here has been incredibly expensive and inefficient … we have had many students complain about the internet infrastructure or D2L being down or slow at consistent rates. We can rectify some of these by stripping them away entirely and allocate more money to more important matters.”

Enelle also explained that “[aside] from saving money, we think that pen-and-paper is the best way to engage students in the classroom on a deeper level. We, some personally, have noticed the effects of lengthy everyday exposure to phones and tablets, the Internet and social media, on Generation Alpha, and frankly, we want nothing to do with that. Boredom, along with the clacking of typewriters, is known to inspire creativity, as contradictory as that sounds.”

Some believe that this plan, expected to save the college over $53,222,839.06, may be related to the recent FAFSA outages. Ally Benevio, who has been employed at the Peak Café at the Larimer Campus since January, expressed in relation to the announcements that “I will no longer have to pretend that I am employed at the Café for only the experience. I can finally get paid for it, too! It’s expensive to have to pay for the textbooks and, well, everything!”

However, Jan Enelle said that, “[it] has been undetermined as of yet that the money saved from this rollback process will necessarily go to paying back monies lost as a result of the issues with FAFSA, but it is an issue we are actively considering.” She then explained that it still has been undetermined exactly where the excess money will go, perhaps to repainting the C level, and installing various neon signs, on the historic Westminster campus.

“That one article in the student newspaper with the little slider on the bottom really put into perspective just how drab it is to attend FRCC’s Westminster campus. It was depressing enough, but then it just put me in a bad mood for the whole rest of the week when I had seen that article,” Enelle remarked.

Despite such rollbacks to the 1980’s, all the diversity programs will not be reverted in any capacity. Jerry Hind, who has been partnered with Student Life and the Multicultural Center, said that “though we may be reverting back to the 1980’s, we are certainly not going to be imitating the likes of Revenge of The Nerds, Animal House or Porky’s. If anything, I’ve heard rumors that more money will be going here. If that’s true, I would be very happy to hear this!”

Finally, a question of whether FRCC’s old legacy of being a college with solar panels was addressed by Dr. Simpson in an email, who said that “there are no plans for reinstating the solar panels that FRCC used to have during the 1980’s. It simply is too costly to ever be considered.”

Steve Berko, director of Maintenance at FRCC, said that re-installing solar panels was, “simply unrealistic, and could never be done.” Despite this, FRCC’s student newspaper, The Front Page, will be renamed back to The Solar Times, as it had been in the 1980s.

In the same email, Dr. Simpson remarked that, “I think this 1980’s program will be a lot more successful than even we had anticipated. It will certainly be better received than the One College system, if the applause at the event last Wednesday was anything to go by!”