For the most part, I enjoy being an English major. The teachers are talented and care for their students, and my classes are focused around critical analysis and application. There’s a lot of reading as to be expected with the degree, but there’s also something I did not expect – being a nomad.

To say that the English majors are awkwardly shuffled about campus to wherever they can hold Shakespeare is an understatement. It took until my second semester at Rowan to get a class at the Winans Wellness Center, but most have it earlier in their degree.

Next semester, I start my day at Winans Hall four out of five days I have classes. Winans isn’t a bad hall if you have a one-off class, but it’ll be my fourth scheduled class in the Wellness Center. I don’t think it’s crazy to say that a wellness center should just be for wellness.

There’s other things that make Winans undesirable for classes. Aside from a few chairs in the waiting room or lobby, there’s no seating. Two of the three classrooms are separated not by walls, but by a divider. If the class next to ours is watching a video, my class can listen in too. There’s also the obvious – sick students are walking in for their appointments and sirens are constantly going off right outside class.

A majority of my major specific classes are in the Wellness Center or James Hall. The latter of the two, the education building, makes sense. While I’m not an English education major, most of my friends and classmates are. Most people who find out I’m an English major assume I want to teach when I graduate. They go hand in hand because it’s one of the clearest career paths from English. But James is overcrowded as is, and also houses multiple other departments besides education, for example, exercise science.

The English department does have a building, the north part of Laurel Hall, but there are no classes there besides the senior seminar for English majors. Laurel Hall is mostly made up of professors’ offices and the cozy English lounge. About a month ago, it was closed temporarily due to water pipe damage. But it’s not an academic building; it functions more as an administrative building.

Here’s the thing. We have nowhere to put the English majors in a building that isn’t flooded or a wellness center. And yet, Rowan seems to constantly want to expand their campus to attract new students, but this is a detriment to current students. Take for instance, the 690 million dollar West Campus Expansion project. Instagram commenters rightfully chewed into Rowan, specifically about the fact that Rowan is building a whole other campus while no one can find parking.

Rowan has so many problems on their current campus that expanding a mile down the road will only create more problems, especially with regard to roads and traffic. For instance, who pays the price when the “more than 5,000 jobs”  Rowan promises with the expansion are backed up on 322, a two-lane road for a majority of campus, with all the commuters? Glassboro and the surrounding towns’ taxpayers will most likely pay the hidden costs of this large-scale expansion.

I’m all for innovation, expansion, and improvement, but it seems in poor taste when the main campus feels like it’s getting too big too fast. I’ve written in The Whit before about Rowan’s disaster that is the parking, but I still stand by the fact that Rowan is constructing new buildings on former parking lots without accounting for building lots, all while expanding their student population.

With these problems it’s obvious who gets the short end of the deal – the humanities majors and commuters, which is nothing new even though there are many of us. Ric Edelman College of Communication, Humanities & Social Sciences is the second largest college at Rowan, and off-campus students and commuters make up 64.77% of undergrads.

While I single out English majors because it’s what I know, plenty of students are Rowan’s ‘middle child.’ I have a simple ask from Rowan: being able to park my vehicle, and not having to take multiple classes in the Wellness Center, both of which are easier said than done.