When I was in second grade, my sister and I really wanted one of those gigantic Barbie playhouse things. Unfortunately, my parents never bought us one. There is light at the end of the tunnel, however, because, that same year, my dad decided to surprise us and make an even bigger dollhouse for us out of wood. We filled that thing with all kinds of fun stuff: a bathtub, a little antique chair, a crib for the baby, and little matching plates and cups for the kitchen table.

Anyway, the point of the story is that, when I think back to that dollhouse, I don’t think about the architectural design of the house or how sturdy the wood was. I think about the little forks and spoons and the little shirts and skirts for the baby. At the very least, I remember the dolls.

On a grander scale, UMass administrators have got it all wrong. Millions of dollars are going into the wrong things.

First of all, they’ve been working on the Fine Arts Center for quite some time. Recently, part of the new design has emerged through the construction – a very large field of cement. Great.

According to the UMass website, we have even more excitement coming our way. “The sidewalk from Pleasant St. to Herter Hall is widened, re-landscaped, and will get six exedras for patrons to gather at. (Exedra is the Greek word for stone bench with a seat back. Our exedra will also incorporate a tall lighting fixture with the possibility of hanging banners from it.)

I have a great idea. Instead of buying six stone “exedras” for “patrons,” let’s buy twelve wooden “benches” for “students” and scatter them throughout campus. We can start by, at least, putting one at every major bus stop. Then we can take the tall “lighting fixture,” return it, and fix all the broken lights around campus. We don’t even have to buy the banners because we could just use the money to buy some paper towels to fill the paper towel holders in the bathrooms TWICE a week instead of once.

As far as making UMass look better, as a whole, the Fine Arts Center was not the right place to start. The first step in beautifying UMass should have been knocking down that useless, ugly shack behind Worcester Dining Hall. Seriously, what is that thing anyway? It’s just a waste of space and a frightening thing to walk by at night. The next step should have been paving the roads on campus. I admit -it makes my day when I’m walking to class and I see a skateboarder fall, but then I remember that instead of paving our walkways, the school is decorating select pieces of ground with cement, and it ruins the moment. The third step should have been draining the campus pond and refilling it with water, instead of leftover sewer liquids, which, might I add, is more in the “health hazard” category than the “beautification” category.

Going back to my dollhouse example, UMass is like that dollhouse and the teachers are like the dolls. It’s the small things we notice and desire, not the big things. When students pay $12,000 to come here, they are not hoping for a new building to be built in place of teachers to teach in them. Dollhouses are nothing without dolls. Students don’t want beautiful, new, Greek stone benches facing a Fine Arts Center, when the performing arts programs barely get enough financial support from the school to even hold an event. Empty dollhouses are no fun at all.

Money doesn’t even seem like it should be a valid excuse. The school mysteriously comes up with sums of money all the time. Last year, $15,000 dollars was wasted paying the Phoenix Design Group to come up with a new mascot that we didn’t even end up using. The sad part is that, if we did change the mascot, and our colors, that would have been even MORE money that the school was willing to spend to repaint and redecorate everything. William Bulger left his service at UMass with one million dollars. The money must be there, somewhere.

Regardless, instead of decorating the school and adding new, unimportant things, we should be improving the quality of what we already have. At the very least, knock down that stupid shack behind the Worcester Dining Common. Please.

Sanam Hakim is a Collegian columnist.