Now, the university has officially joined the ranks of schools with brick sidewalks, standing proudly beside such schools as, well, N.C. State.

The fact of the matter is that the sidewalks around the Quad needed to be repaved. They were cracked and dirty, making them nearly unusable unless you walk or rode something with rubber tires. They also subtracted from the beauty quotient on campus, as a brick-bedecked Quad will most certainly not do. Apparently, the old sidewalk had just seen its day come.

In all seriousness, the decision, made last spring, to change the surface of the sidewalks on the Quad was apparently one that the donor to the project had always dreamed would be made. In the face of this kind of pressure, the administration really had no choice but to see that it be done.

However, I question the utility of the brick over cement, and the results of it now that it's been in place for a few months. The brick will undoubtedly wear out and have to be replaced. If you go to N.C. State for any reason and walk on their campus, you'll rarely find a sidewalk that isn't being torn up for more brick treatment. It can also fail to seal as tightly as cement and can be more uneven than our 50-year-old sidewalks had been.

They do provide an attractive surface, but at what cost? At the beginning of the year, when the ground was at its thirstiest and the brick was as yet untested, I walked down to the bookstore to get some textbooks for my upcoming classes, to which I was so looking forward. Imagine my surprise when, upon cresting the rise beside the chapel and preparing to walk down toward Taylor, I found myself wading through anywhere between one and three inches of rainwater. The sidewalk, which had been put in while the city was in the midst of the biggest drought in decades, apparently drains water much more poorly than the sidewalk around Reynolda Hall.

I have found this to be true several times more, as I walk around in rainy weather getting my feet unnecessarily wet.

Now, I'm not proposing that we build a mini-Talladega in Winston Salem, but was a little banking too much to ask, to at least make sure that most of the water stays on the grass and the sidewalk doesn't get flooded?

All these complaints about how the sidewalk looks and functions are, however, beside the point. I believe that the biggest question that has to be asked about the sidewalk is in regards to the other things that could have been done in its place. Perhaps a scholarship fund could have been started, or continued. Perhaps a gesture could have been made toward starting the endowment to waive tuition for all undergraduate students.

The donation was made specifically to improve the facilities, but considering the need to replace the cement around the Quad with something, could it not have been replaced in kind, and the remainder of the money used for something else?

Simply speaking, I wonder if the decision to redo the Quad in brick could have been reconsidered. Of course, I welcome comments from anyone on the issue, but if these questions had been asked ahead of time, perhaps something different could have been done.