For students, May 18 is the first official day of summer, but for MU Administration, it is the day that they can move back into Jesse Hall.
Jesse Auditorium will be the first room to reopen. The Commencement Ceremony for graduates will be held May 15. After that, offices will reopen, starting with the Chancellor’s office on May 18.
“We’re looking forward to being back in Jesse with many of the other offices,” MU spokesman Christian Basi said. “It will be nice to see many familiar faces in the hallways.”
Jesse Hall has been undergoing improvements since July 2014, and there are many safety updates, Manager of Communications Karlan Seville said.
“We installed a sprinkler system (with about 1,400 sprinklers) and about 400 smoke alarms, upgraded the existing elevator and added an elevator to meet current ADA codes,” she said. “We also improved the HVAC system (heating and air condition), which will be more reliable and energy efficient.”
While these changes were being made, more than 600 administrators had to be relocated to other campus locations, such as Reynolds Alumni Center, North Residence Hall, McReynolds Hall, Rock Quarry Center, General Services Building and Ellis Library, she said.
Director of Libraries James Cogswell said that Ellis hosted a majority of the guests, with 100 people from offices like Financial Aid Office, Office of Admissions and the Registrar’s Office.
There are only 139 workers in Ellis normally, and Cogswell described adding the extra workers as a complication.
“This is a complex thing, moving 600 people out of the largest single office building on campus and then putting them in (multiple locations),” he said, “It has been disruptive in that sense.”
He said that these disruptions were felt more by students than faculty. Two major study rooms had to be used for office space, and a total of 400 study spaces were gone for the whole year. However, the library tried to add as much study spots as possible.
“We recouped about half that number that we lost,” Cogswell said. “If you walk around you’ll almost trip over things because we took almost every nook and cranny of the building and put a chair if it would fit and a table if we had one.”
Cogswell described the problems with faculty as “minimal.”
“The thing is we knew and the guests knew that we were going to have to make the best of a difficult year,” he said. “We’ve just accommodated one another and come to like each other.”
Now that the guests will be moving back into Jesse, the library has made plans for what they would like to do with the newly-available space.
“(We’re) reconstituting that space for students to study,” Cogswell said. “(We would like) renewed and renovated study places for people, we’d like more study alcoves for small groups.”
