(12-22-2024 09:18 PM)TheBanner Wrote: Dr. Garrison was a tremendous advocate for athletics but also had a very powerful support system of vice presidents who believed this step was critical to the future of student life at UAB - with athletics being the cornerstone of growing the undergraduate campus.
Dr. Garrison had big dreams for the undergraduate side of campus that have completely died. UAB has continued to invest somewhat on the west side of campus in terms of new buildings, but it's basically just keeping up with inflation vs. other universities.
During this era you had Dr. G and others like Drs. Margison and Marchase openly speaking about their ambition to get UAB into the AAU alongside universities like NYU, UNC, Texas, Caltech, Cal, Stanford, Duke, UCLA, Emory, Georgia Tech, Harvard, MIT, and many others. They were openly speaking about the issues on the undergraduate side that kept UAB out (namely, graduation rates) and were beginning to work on turning the ship. They very clearly had the idea that the undergraduate side of campus--all of it, not just Nursing and Public Health and departments that feed the School of Medicine--was important and should be as prestigious as the professional schools
Since she left, I don't think anyone with the word 'president' in their title, from VPs to EVPs to Ray Ray himself have uttered the letters AAU. The stagnation of athletics aside, the administration letting the undergraduate side stagnate and even begin to slip backwards is criminal. There is no reason UAB should not be mentioned in the same breath as those I did above. There's no reason UAB couldn't be Alabama's Georgia Tech, an academically rigorous university that generates some of the smartest and most successful graduates at all levels, while also performing incredibly important and meaningful research at the same time
I think this would have been just as if not more embarrassing to the Tuscaloosa crowd. UA is not in the AAU and has never had any aspirations to join. They already administratively treat the UAB Health System as separate from UAB. The satellite campus of the UAB School of Medicine in Tuscaloosa has "University of Alabama School of Medicine" on it, no mention of UAB and they all wear red piped coats, and it's administratively part of UA as the "Community College of Health Sciences"--no such setup exists in Huntsville, it's just straight up the UAB SOM reporting to UAB directly not UAH.
The jealousy extends beyond football, that just happened to be the red line they didn't want to be crossed
(12-22-2024 09:18 PM)TheBanner Wrote: If you look at the map you will see the thing that really drove a wedge much more than the stadium itself. Green space. The idea was to extend the Campus Green from Southside (almost all the way to Dreamland) northto Railroad Park.
The football stadium was a centerpiece, but interconnected blocks of green walkable campus lined with new dorms, class buildings, and apartments and restaurants (as you went further north) was the dream for UAB's future.
Richard Margison was a great internal force behind this. This was a university initiative, not athletics. It was an exciting time where there was a clear vision for the future of UAB.
A lot of non-UAB land along that corridor, including government-owned buildings like the Jefferson County Health Department and Cooper Green. That big boulevard of a park was a bit of a pipe dream (these long-range vision maps always are to some extent). IIRC the map in the reddit post isn't even the original version, as the plan was that Regions Field would be a few blocks to the east, I think, and the green space was truly planned to go all the way to the park, but they ended up not getting the land they wanted for Regions Field and it shifted (someone correct me if I'm wrong here but I think I've got the gist of it)
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A Reddit post I came across
