Is Robert Frost's Miami Melting?
The cost of Cook Field, Millett Hall and our college experience
Evan Stefanik
Caitlin Curran
You roll in from the state route. To your right, a wall of construction blocks your vision around the corner. Dust flies from its surface and clings to your windows.
Eyes peeled in that direction, you pull through the roundabout. For a moment, something like a museum flickers into view. Then, you jolt to a stop. A food delivery robot crosses the street, its tiny orange flag bobbing past your windshield. At the next intersection, red shirts dot the street’s perimeter, each shouting or holding a sign.
Turning left, you venture around a vast square. Buildings you pass hide behind scaffolding and neon-clad employees. At the final corner, you veer down a winding road, where towering assemblages of black metal fill the fields. You squint at the signs in front of a series of stone establishments, trying to make sense of it all.
Driving away, you peer into your rearview mirror as the mess recedes in the distance. It looked like any ordinary college campus, obscured by a constant, concrete Bildungsroman. The place blended right in with the rest of the colleges across the country.
If I said that was Miami University, would you recognize it?
Robert Frost deemed Miami “the most beautiful campus that there ever was.” In reverence of its Georgian-esque architectural inspiration and ample access to nature, he championed the university’s potential.
Today, as my graduation looms, I watch Miami betray Frost’s characterization. My fictional rendering in the introduction compiles the upcoming changes proposed by those in charge, including the effects of those already in place: a new arena colonizes Cook Field; Grubhub and artificial intelligence gentrify our academic spaces; faculty and peers resort to activism; construction defames our hotspots; solar power farms pummel the grass; and old building names, like those on Western, succumb to memory. Opponents deem Miami a “sinking public ivy brand.”
However, not everybody at Miami perceives a threat. Optimists interpret the changes as innovative opportunities for our campus to remain competitive. They acknowledge the temporary risks to opinion and the necessity for a cautious pace but affirm their vision that it someday pays off for the university.
President Gregory Crawford, the school’s Board of Trustees, donors and other stakeholders seek to bolster Miami’s attractiveness to the general public. Their focus leans less on the university’s aesthetic heritage. Instead, they pursue high-profile athletic projects to catch enrollees and sustainable energy sourcing to future-proof operations.
But these ambitions coincide with an ongoing university-wide crisis: a $36 million budget deficit reported at the close of the last fiscal year.
Donors, while encouraging construction, contribute a crucial amount to Miami’s funding for these developments. Over time, the university’s path to carbon neutrality by 2040 will also minimize the campus’s operational costs.
Yet Miami now appears at a tipping point of priorities, each with unique consequences.
Miami rests on uncharted territory, motivated either by preserving its rich tradition and aesthetic or experimenting for the effect of revenue.
When not planned properly, money-makers could have a pernicious impact on our campus. The zeitgeist orbits around this Cook-Millett drama, but it signals a trajectory of disorder in the university’s future as a whole.
This pattern mirrors the ongoing trends in higher education. According to 2026 gubernatorial candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, Ohio has more universities than any other state, yet it contains the least number of people under 18 who might enroll in college. Miami’s government subsidy lies at about 8% today, one of the lowest amounts for a public university according to a search on the Ohio auditor’s website. And with Ohio recently capping tuition increases, Miami has fewer levers to pull.
To cooperate with the industrializing forces at play, Miami gets creative. As the university moves toward geothermally-heated buildings to achieve carbon neutrality, more renovation pops up.
Miami also recently employed its Transform, Honor, Realize, Innovate, Value and Embrace initiative, which addresses contemporary issues and includes passionate ideas such as the new sports arena. These well-intended efforts grant trade-offs, sometimes at the expense of academics.
The Faculty Alliance of Miami stood its ground on the latter. Although professors reached an agreement in the university legislature about their pay, concerns about the quality of classes still linger in the periphery. Many faculty report low morale, particularly in light of the new requirement to tack another course onto their workload next semester. Recent years show the volatility of certain disciplines at Miami, such as with the gradual folding of humanities and classics.
Both instructors and students navigate an environment ultimately out of their control.
Upper-level disregard for student input bore itself when Crawford first announced Cook’s replacement of Millett. On the 11-member committee tasked with recommending spaces for the updated arena, no students served. Only one faculty member, Kelly Knollman-Porter, did. She also heads Miami’s Campus Planning Committee, but the university largely interacted with the Board of Trustees rather than conventionally via her team. Miami implemented the ad hoc site-seek as an appeasement after the conflict-of-interest went noticed and faculty took action in the university Senate.
An article published by the Oxford Free Press exposed that more than one-fifth of student respondents disapproved of the Cook Field arena project. Despite debates on and off campus, our voices have largely been ignored.
At the very least, students deserved better access to information and meaningful involvement surrounding Cook Field and Millett Hall. Advocating for students’ desires and warnings asks greater questions about the campus we leave behind. Future students inherit the beautiful Miami that past generations loved and learned from. Nothing assuages the current animosity over divergent interests at the top, so we hold onto it.
Miami needs democratic, mindful leadership to carry its legacy forward. Our fling with extraneous financial sources could compromise us until we conform to the generic, marketable sterility of any other American university. To avoid that, students keep Miami accountable for its exclusionary decisions.
What else will Miami turn into a test? How does the university justify sports to profit better than the usual strategies? Why, suddenly, does money dominate every conversation?
Is Robert Frost’s Miami melting?
After the initiation of Cook’s sports arena, any building at Miami seems susceptible to change.
Miami’s Physical Facilities Department uses Facility Condition Indexes (FCIs) to determine the annual reinvestment rate of buildings, assessing funding from the time of completion to its last renovation. The 30-50% FCI demolishable range jeopardizes many buildings on campus. If the building’s amenities fail to evolve, according to Cody Powell, donors swoop in and request a redo with the potential perk of attributing their namesake.
Powell, associate vice president of facilities planning and operations, pointed out how critics highlight only the obvious signs of devolution, like stained ceiling tiles, leaks and window air-conditioners. When Miami’s community antagonizes a demolition, they often overlook its necessity for reasons of safety, disability inclusivity and classroom size.
FCI examination results rose to prominence in the university’s 2012 campus master plan. Split into multiple parts, this outline initially aimed to improve fire safety and disability-compliant protocol. Now, it bends further to the will of institutional benchmarks.
“We used to be driven by a formula,” Powell said. “Then, about a decade ago, the state started prioritizing STEM facilities. We submit requests for capital appropriations every two years to renovate buildings, but it’s never enough.”
Residence halls receive no state funding, only the revenue generated by the work of Powell’s office. As academic buildings vanish or become vain, students and their spaces yet again reap little reward.
Robert Bell, director of planning, architecture and engineering, suggests Miami has always flirted with more modern agendas. Once Crawford signed the President’s Climate Leadership Commitment in 2020, Miami finished its long-term plan by 2024.
Bell pushed back on sustainability criticisms, crediting the incoming solar field on Western campus to eventually provide cleaner and cheaper energy with less need for an off-campus source like Duke Energy. Miami will implement the $5 million endowment this fall.
The solar park will connect to trails in Miami’s Natural Areas, leaving a spare amount of green free from materialism.
He also supported the geothermal drilling, part of the routinely modified utility master plan, in front of the current Millett Hall. Wells run 850 feet deep and void further construction, like parking and turf, on the plot.
“Sustainability has been fully built into us for the last decade, so we’re already in great condition and ready compared to other universities,” Bell said. “But it’s difficult to change the habits that come with it.”
Bell’s qualm rings most true for the new arena. Miami continues refining its blueprints, in contrast to rumors confirming its many complex facets. Powell clarified that the replacement for Cook Field will arrive before the removal of the original site, so students can expect to own a recreational zone in the meantime.
A hotel could emerge, but the $3.5 million early concept proposal only passed in December 2024 and requires substantial reevaluation, as it lacks a funding resolution. For Millett itself, Miami added 10 new gift officers to procure and maintain donors, some of whom pledged $5 million each, Powell said. The project will break ground in about a year, after the hiring of a criteria architect and design team.
Prospects of renovating Millett surfaced roughly a decade ago, but investors expressed little interest. The arena houses three sports, none of which yield much victory in Miami’s athletic realm and, therefore, prompt fewer undergraduate recruits. Attendance at games has fallen to disappointing lows, according to reporting by The Miami Student.
Despite the disparaged transparency, both in reference to the arena and its internal progress, Miami assumes an urgency for this athletic pursuit. For its subjects, though, the action may pit them against their cherished university.
Cook Field is almost in David Prytherch’s front yard. The geography professor’s office window offers a view of students banding together every day. After working here for 21 years, he said he intimately knows the space’s significance to them.
“Students just don’t get it,” Prytherch said of Cook Field’s demolition. “It doesn’t make sense to them. It disempowers them.”
Prytherch sides with those on campus who stress about too much happening at once. Since the arena earned the record for the university's largest-ever single capital investment, Prytherch expected a more rigorous campus plan and economic feasibility analysis behind it. Not a borrowing of $170 million.
He watches as his and his colleague’s classrooms fade beneath shifting institutional pressures. To Prytherch, glory in sports matters less than educational integrity.
“We need to be very careful: Nobody knows if it’ll be a successful investment or not,” Prytherch said. “[The arena] could tip the balance into eroding our identity and trust.”
Other faculty members support the project. Straying from the speculations that it might cause commotion, Powell said it “will vastly improve traffic by returning it to the state route” rather than flooding arena-visitors onto campus. Adam Beissel, an associate professor in sports leadership and management (SLAM), tries to widen the horizon.
Beissel projected how a new arena could satisfy Miami’s desperate need for a conference center. He sees theater, celebrity guests and other events besides athletics occurring there, which might sell the campus appeal to nuanced audiences.
His perspective gives the project a fair chance, especially since Millett waited its turn for renovation after all the other athletic facilities. It could expand opportunities for the growing body of students in kinesiology, the third-largest major at Miami, and other sports studies.
“They’re being mindful of academics,” Beissel said. “One out of every 10 SLAM students could benefit from the renovation.”
He identified Miami as inhabiting a “middle phase,” gradually emphasizing sports as a recruitment tactic.
“There’s a demand to attract students with athletics, and that’s how any big school can market its reputation,” Beissel said. “[The] University of Cincinnati or Xavier University can fill their venues, but for us, it’s an uphill battle.”
However, many students form their character around a refusal to easily submit.
The athletics adjustments trickle into the bigger dilemmas in higher education, which chapter leader Kali Barcroft of Miami’s Ohio Student Association (OSA) fights against. This semester, OSA mainly tackled Ohio Senate Bill 1 (S.B. 1). Barcroft latched onto the activism of The Ohio State University students and imbued it in Miami’s student body using petitions and protests.
She worries Miami’s tolerance of these broader trends will denigrate identity-related organizations and female students. Same for both Barcroft’s OSA and the student experience with the new sports arena, the road to justice stretches ahead as formidable, but not impossible.
“When students are upset enough to be involved, we have a lot more power than we realize,” Barcroft said. “Miami has the potential to be a place for student activism.”
Barcroft said professors are “scared to talk” about the commands in S.B. 1 and other stipulations of the university. Their hesitation rubs off in their work, as Prytherch argued that not paying professors enough but increasing their workload means a degraded student experience. Along with budget cuts to smaller academic sectors, Prytherch forecasts an endless cycle for Miami’s educational future.
“Faculty morale is at an all-time low,” Prytherch said.
Overall, faculty contrarian to the arena feel stifled in their positions. Leadership at any college might neglect its community’s testimonies, but Miami’s Board of Trustees did so strongly when Stephen Gordon spoke at its meeting. Gordon retired in December 2023 after many years as the McGuffey House and Museum administrator, supervising and protecting Miami’s green spaces throughout his career.
When he presented about the arena on behalf of dissident students and his long professional experience, Gordon said he felt ignored.
“They basically didn’t address any of the negative concerns,” Gordon said. “My biggest worry is that we need to be cautious with how we conserve Miami’s green spaces. We have to keep in mind what’s best for the university.”
The arena appalls some faculty, who say it wanders too far from the top priorities for their students. However, faculty predicts the multiple solar farms and other upcoming construction projects as direct aid to students. Bell and Prytherch support Crawford’s carbon-neutral plan because of student demand.
Prytherch said students “were banging on the doors of the trustees meeting” in order to accomplish their written Climate Action Plan.
“There’s a difference between [the sports arena] and that,” Prytherch said. “Students wanted those changes.”
Due to Crawford’s efforts, Miami boasts a gold status on STARS, the Sustainability Tracking, Assessment & Rating System for colleges across the country. Miami resides in that second tier along with 181 schools, with only eight of them in America, Bell said. Crawford, said he wants to join the platinum rank as soon as possible, acknowledging Miami’s advantage in sustainability planning.
Only 13 colleges belong to it.
If Miami grasps for the highest of prizes – in athletics, sustainability and every other mainstream motive – students either embrace or suffer these probabilities.
In the race for the most impressive campus, Miami was already ahead. Somewhere in the timeline, it pushed that fact to the side and concentrated on commercializing.
A majority of students tend not to comprehend the occasion. Bell said that “requires changing the student narrative,” so his office provides pro-sustainability advertising in their academic and residential buildings.
Early in the arena controversy, Miami emailed a campus sustainability survey to students, gauging and attempting to promote their awareness. Beissel said Miami “has been slow to release feedback” on the project. Maybe the university secretly heeds the amplifying student-faculty-alumni dissent.
No matter what changes at Miami, the bottom line is that its community overwhelmingly feels powerless. We see familiar sites like Cook Field and Western as sacred to our experience and wish our academic and social settings the best as Miami reconstructs them from the inside out.
Millett is the latest on the university’s chopping block, but with a list of buildable sites on campus prime for future projects, it may not be the last.
Miami rushed the new arena plans and much else past students. The state of constant construction and maneuvering logistics foments a claustrophobia on campus. Do we have to forfeit our green spaces just because Miami’s sustainability track record bodes so well? Students deserve better buildings, but why sacrifice our history?
Or is Miami’s community propagandizing panic? Could Miami actually consider Frost’s beautiful encounter, while incorporating students and faculty, with respect?
I think only time will tell – if Miami survives it long enough.
