The Friends of College Park and Shattuck Observatory have a petition you can sign to register your opposition to the removal of the observatory and the construction of a dormitory complex in the park. There is a fascinating history of the observatory as well.

But signs are not good. Back in September, the project page listed an upcoming milestone:

November: Review conceptual design results with Board of Trustees. If results are favorable, request Trustee approval to proceed with next phase of Schematic Design.

The Trustees do not seem to have publicly announced their reaction. But the results are obviously favorable, since now the project page says:

March 2018: Review conceptual design results with Board of Trustees. Subsequent project steps are TBD.

This plan must be pretty fantastic if it can convince otherwise rational people that it is worth pursuing. But not apparently so great that it can withstand public scrutiny.

One wishes the planners would at least say why they cannot build four or five well-sited new dorms in established clusters. Allowing that 750 beds are needed, why do they have to be all together? Are the economies of scale so great (or the school’s finances so poor) that the college cannot afford to separate the buildings? Or is it that the only proper building sites are reserved for other buildings whose planning the college does not yet want to acknowledge?

The dorms in College Park could very well end up looking like Sasaki’s Wolf Ridge Apartments at N.C. State University in Raleigh, N.C.:

That’s some perfectly adequate flat-roofed university housing, built on a ridge.