After four long years of renovation, the magnificent Rubrics Building at the heart of campus has finally reopened its doors. Only figuratively, however; try and tap your student card to get in, and you’ll be met with an all-too-familiar buzzing and red flashing light. Boasting state-of-the-art facilities, a central location just behind the Campanile, and a remarkable historic legacy as the oldest building on campus, the newly-renovated Rubrics is a natural home for student life. This Editorial Board deplores the College’s decision to relegate its use instead to tourists, visiting staff and retired faculty, leaving students to gawk at The Rubrics’s modern, eerily-empty spaces from the outside.
It is a Trinity adage at this point that more student spaces are sorely needed on campus. Beyond some ramshackle spaces in the Arts Building, the small Students’ Union kitchen, and the often-overcrowded Buttery, there are few dedicated spaces for Trinity students to meet, socialise, relax, eat, wait between classes, and engage with the student community the College claims to be so eager to foster. Postgraduate students in particular have long been deprived of convenient, pleasant dedicated spaces on campus. The Rubrics’s central location and fitted-out modern facilities makes it a perfect candidate for such common spaces. Yet its open-plan area, complete with lockers, toilets and kitchens, has instead been allocated for use by retired fellows.
The initiative to integrate retired faculty into academic projects is positive, but it certainly does not require a space so central and, more importantly, of this scale. The reading room stands empty most of the time; as one professor tells us, “the entire area may have one to two people using it for an hour or two per day”. One can only imagine to what better use The Rubrics’s spaces would be put towards student life. We have focused here on common rooms, but it is all too easy to think of any number of additional purposes. Library study spaces are notoriously limited. So are well-designed, modern teaching spaces. Many PhD students have no office to work in. The Academic Registry and Global Room are tucked away at the far end of campus. Student accommodation, of course, is an obvious contender; besides the reading room, the building also houses about thirty rooms, primarily allocated to new and visiting staff and tourists. Among these, one counts nine student rooms — scant consolation for a student body desperately in need of more and better housing.
The College’s misuse of the building is all the more disappointing given that the renovation’s “groundbreaking” sustainability solutions, as Trinity so proudly advertises, have made it one of the most energy-efficient buildings on campus. If The Rubrics’s emissions are now remarkably low, it may be because there is practically no-one there to use it. To make a real difference in both student life and the environment, Trinity must not just design impressive spaces but shift the centre of active college life towards them. In its current approach to The Rubrics, the College seems unfortunately to have followed the approach of the design firm leading the revamp: “to do as much as necessary, but as little as possible”. The College must do more, not less, to shape its spaces around the current demands of college life. If the reopening of The Rubrics is about “being brave and bold about the future”, as Provost Linda Doyle says, this necessitates rethinking its past use and understanding its place in Trinity today.
Ironically for a building infamous for a historical murder, Trinity’s decision has left The Rubrics a ghost town. That there is “nothing to frighten away Edward Ford’s ghost”, as one Trinity newsletter quips, should be criticised, not advertised. This Editorial Board urges the College to reevaluate its choice and reopen The Rubrics’s doors — literally, this time — as an active hub at the heart of college life.
