- April 30th, 2006, 1:55 am
#13929
Colleges ensure too much of a good thinghttp://www.newsadvance.com/servlet/Sate ... 7990&path=
Lynchburg News & Advance
April 27, 2006
Let’s make it official. No Lynchburg college is an island.
That was proven recently with the revelation that all four of the city’s major four-year institutions - Liberty University, Lynchburg College, Randolph-Macon Woman’s College and Sweet Briar - will be holding their graduation ceremonies on the weekend of May 13 through 14.
Which might be OK if they were located in, say, Los Angeles. For Lynchburg, this onslaught of thousands of parents, siblings, boyfriends, girlfriends and other interested parties (not to mention the media types who will be covering Sen. John McCain’s speech at Liberty) will swamp the city’s available reservoir of hotel and motel rooms, beds & breakfasts and extra pullout couches.
Ann Ripley, for one, is not pleased. She runs the Federal Crest Inn in the city’s historic district and has been fielding phone calls by the dozens from people seeking shelter that weekend.
“And they’re very unhappy with me when I say I don’t have anything,” she said.
George Caylor, another B&B owner, said parents have been offering him “whatever money it takes” to get a room.
But it gets worse. May 14 also happens to be Mother’s Day.
Suppose your mom lives in Westminster-Canterbury or Valley View, and you wanted to drop in on her that weekend. Unless you can unroll a sleeping bag in her room, you’re pretty much out of luck.
To me, though, this fiasco has larger implications - the apparent lack of cooperation and communication between local colleges.
It’s true that R-MWC, Sweet Briar and Lynchburg College have been known to pool computer memory and course offerings. That makes it even more improbable that they would all pick the same weekend for their commencement.
Meanwhile, Liberty has a history of going it alone. Yet again, forging ahead regardless of possible conflicts with other schools only penalizes the parents of its own students.
It doesn’t stop here. There have been a number of occasions when a local college entertained a major speaker or staged a major event that butted heads with someone else’s major speaker or major event.
While this is obviously impossible to avoid at times, it might happen less often if the various schools shared their event plans with their colleagues across town.
Lynchburg Regional Chamber of Commerce director Rex Hammond told News & Advance reporter Bethany Fuller that his organization would “continue to talk with the colleges and universities about the issue.”
I’ll bet he will - if he’s recovered from the ringing in his ears from hostile parental static.
The weekend of May 13 through 14 will, of course, be a watershed two days for motels, hotels and restaurants. I would strongly suggest not planning your anniversary dinner for the night of the 13th, lest it prove most unlucky.
With a little planning, however, local merchants could have enjoyed two profitable weekends and a lot less aggravation. Liberty alone will graduate 2,400 seniors.
So where will the overflow go? Well, a few will find refuge in Altavista/Danville, most will relocate to Roanoke and Charlottesville and commute to the graduation ceremonies. Where are they likely to spend money? In Altavista, Danville, Roanoke and Charlottesville.
If we’re a city that purports to be all about tourism, this can’t be a good thing. In future years, when one of these parents is thinking about taking a trip here, a warning buzzer may sound off deep in the their brain’s repository of unpleasant experiences.
“Wait a minute,” they’ll say. “Lynchburg? That’s the place without any hotel rooms.”
Maybe this will start the local colleges talking to each other. Meanwhile, Altavista, Danville, Roanoke and Charlottesville will enjoy their graduations.
- By ECC29
- By Purple Haize