The University of Mississippi Department of Parking and Transportation’s new policies have not only received criticism from students, but faculty as well.
Some designated faculty parking lots force faculty members to walk further to class, while their parking lot spaces are now limited to a certain amount of spots.
“Just last week I spent fifteen minutes looking for a spot,” said Anne Twittey, assistant professor of history. “Classes, obviously, hadn’t even started, forcing faculty to park further and further from their offices. By decreasing the number of spaces available to us, this keeps the number (of spaces) flat while the size of the faculty grows.”
Faculty members having to pay for parking and parking tickets is another concern for some faculty.
“It’s a very hot topic for me that we have to pay for our parking tags,” said Kathrine Pigeon, an EDHE instructor, counselor and learning specialist at Ole Miss. “If you get a tickets it’s automatically taken out of your pay check. So they are hard on us for that. I think it’s a little bit ridiculous that we have to pay for that, and besides I think that should be a perk.”
Pigeon also believes the new parking policy will limit accessibility between students and faculty members.
“It will certainly decrease the likeliness of jumping in your car and going to where you need to go to meet with someone,” she said. “You can’t get there as fast, and you are too busy looking for a spot. It will certainly increase emails instead of meetings in their office.”
Accessibility to professors is important for many students, including junior political science major Ian Ford.
“I’d much rather meet a teacher in person,” said Ford. “I can look at them in person and know that their full attention is on me and vice versa. They can see that I’m going to them because I’m going to class, and that I am taking time out of my schedule also to go and talk to them.”
If the faculty parking lot is full, faculty members now have to pay one dollar to park in visitor spots, something that Twittey says adds to the accessibility issues.
“(This) leads to a lot of frustration and discourages us from coming to campus as often as we might like,” Twittey said. “An accessible faculty is, in part, a function of a sensible parking policy.”
One recurring suggested solution to fix the parking problem is a parking garage.
“I think the whole parking situation is pretty much messed up in general,” said Ford. “I think Ole Miss is a growing campus and I think it’s about time to build a parking garage. I think you can put one behind the Ridges, those freshman dorms, and nobody would ever really see them that way.”
