The founder of the campaign for a University sports centre has expressed her anger at the announcement that £46 million will be spent on the development of a new science building.
Charlotte Roach accused the University of failing its student body by refusing to find similar funds for a proposed sports centre project.
It was announced on Friday that the huge sum will be spent on merging the Department of Materials Science and Metallurgy into one building on the West Cambridge site.
The new building will include a specialist facility to house sensitive electron microscopes used by the department.
But the move has itself come under the microscope from the 800yearswithnosportscentre campaign, whose founder claims that it demonstrates academic elitism:
“The university should prioritise supporting the needs of their major student body over and above fundraising and updating an existing department for the use of a few academics.
“Cambridge has among the worst sports facilities in the country. I only wish the University committed as much effort to funding that as they do to this building”
Llewellyn Kinch, a Blues cyclist and natsci, was more reserved: “It’s great that the university has shown the ability to get money for a project like this but I only wish they could do the same when it comes to sports facilities.
“I’m distraught at the idea that people might be put off coming here because of the poor facilities – to be honest I spend more time doing sport than in the department!”
Roach has called for the University to publically commit to the sports centre project.
“At the moment they are misleading future applicants by showing models and plans for the centre without making a public commitment to building it.
“They have just announced that they are building a new science department to the tune of £46 million but can’t even commit publically to the sports centre.”
The new science block is expected to reduce running costs by £100,000 per year by combining the department into one building, instead of the five it currently uses.
The project will be funded by the HEFCE (Higher Education Funding Council for England) capital investment fund, with £2.25m being provided by the Wolfson Foundation.
The University has yet to comment.
Who is this Llewellyn Kinch character?!? clearly an admissions error
Lllewellyn Kinch is my favourite cyclist; his lycra is particularly arousing
I agree with Roach, this university should do much more to find the funding for the sports centre.
It’s just dissapointing that the the university can’t see that uni life is about giving a rounded education and sport is crucial to this by giving life skills that are far greater than cambridge! but alas, sadly they are simply striving to attract new students when really it is the current students who make cambridge the place that it is today and blend it for the future….
As a member of the University Council and signatory to the report authorising the construction of this building, I would like to point out that HEFCE, not the University, is funding this building, and that HEFCE is not a body which pays for sports centres.
To present this as an either/or situation is factually incorrect, and I think that to condemn the University for building educational projects with money intended for that purpose is wrong.
David, the story is very clearly NOT The Tab accusing the university of a misuse of funds (the fact that it is HEFCE funding is in the penultimate paragraph)
It is a story about how the announcement of this project has prompted the 800yearswithnosportscentre to call again for a public commitment to the sports centre and demand more urgency in the search for funds for that facility.
I’m confident that no-one at this univeristy would expect sports funding from a body with ‘Higher Education’ in its name!
As the University sort above me has said, there’s no point in criticising the uni for building a new centre for Material Science. Because HEFCE’s picking up the bill, it’s a no-brainer for the university to build it on somebody else’s dime, and free up lots of city centre real estate.
And here’s the rub – if the sports centre advocates had any sense, they’d be looking at the uni’s rather more important plans to move all the humanities departments which currently inhabit the Mill Lane site to a new building on the Sidgwick site, freeing up masses of prime land along the Mill Pond for a lucrative redevelopment. The uni has already started planning this redevelopment, and by all accounts it’s going to make them an absolute mint.
Surely the sportspeople of Cambridge would be better off demanding that some of this cash is ploughed into sports facilities? Not that I give a toasty fuck – all sport other than French cricket is a boneheaded waste of time, and the money could be much better spent on a health spa in the UL. This back isn’t going to rub itself.
Make your mind up about the apostrophe. If you want to end up working as a sub for Murdoch you’ll need better editing skills.
[...] have blazed across The Tab this week as the University and Trinity College splashed the cash. Cambridge announced the next great 800th year [...]
The sportsmen and women do pretty well here. There's loads for them to take part in (even if the facilities aren't the best) and they are generally among the most popular students. At the end of the day we are an academic university, not a sports college.
obviously don't play sport of any kind
1) Money has to be prioritised – if we are to compete internationally with universities like Harvard and Yale with more money than sense we can't be wasting it on an activity that it essentially subsidiary to the main academic goal of the university.
2) The college system that we have in Cambridge means that a significantly higher proportion of students can get involved in competitive sport than any other Uni. At somewhere like Bristol if you want to play rugby or row, you're going to have to make the uni squad.
The lack of a sports centre is indeed reflective of the break up of sports funding on college level – maybe what is needed is simply greater centralisation of this? If you were to add up the total amount of money that goes into sports across all the colleges, and values of rugby fields, boat clubs, boats (Which cost an awful lot of money, average price for just one of those eights that most colleges have several of can be at least 20,000) i’m sure you would find that Cambridge actually has a substantial amount of money invested in sport. However, if you were to centralise you may lose some of the vitality of college competition
3) The Majority of students aren’t really too affected by the fact that we don't have a sports centre. If sport is your priority you simply made a mistake applying to Cambridge (Loughborough would have been a better bet)