Names missing; UA redoing part of walk

When Ciara Coleman was fresh out of high school and scouting colleges, the Senior Walk tradition at the University of Arkansas ranked high on her list of what made the Fayetteville campus immediately feel like family.

The university’s 3 miles of sidewalks engraved with the names of UA’s graduating classes dating to 1876 is believed to be a unique feature among American universities.

“It shows you’re not a number at Arkansas,” said Coleman of Lee’s Summit, Mo. “They care enough about people to carve your name on the walk.”

After Coleman earned her bachelor’s degree in businessadministration in December 2011, she looked forward to the day her name would appear.

Earlier this month whenUA workers began stenciling and engraving names for Senior Walk 2012 near the campus’s Greek Theater, Coleman’s friends snapped photos of the sidewalk - which didn’t include her name where it should have been.

“I was getting all these pictures in. It was brutal,” she said with a laugh. “At 8 a.m. the next day, I’m calling the registrar’s office.”

Coleman’s call led UA officials to the discovery that 334 names from the 2011-2012 graduating class were missing from the rubber stencils used to engrave the names, UA Registrar Dave Dawson said.

Workers with UA’s Facilities Management office hadfinished engraving the A and B sections of the walk and were partly through engraving the Cs when the problem was noticed, he said.

The workers will start over and redo those portions of the walk, as the missing names were scattered throughout the list of 4,533 graduates who consented for their names to be added.

The 2012 walk, originally targeted for completion by this year’s May 11 commencement, is now expected to be finished in August, Dawson said.

Coleman said she could have lived with her name being tacked onto the end after the Z’s if hers had been among a few left off. But the thought of a large group being absent entirely? She couldn’t bear it.

1905 START

Plenty of news articles, brochures and even a documentary have chronicled the history of Senior Walk, which began when members of the Class of 1905 were the first to scrawl their names with a stick in wet cement on the front lawn of Old Main.

When members of the Class of 1904 got wind of it, they collected money to have their names drawn on, too, according to the university’s 2008 historical documentary Beacon of Hope.

Later, the university began backfilling the names to the first graduating class of 1876.

In those days, the graduating classes were so small that occasionally there were no graduates in a year’s time, as happened in 1887 and 1895.

By 1925, the university began stamping the names on. In the 1980s, the task had become more time-consuming as degree-earners grew, and the university fell several classes behind.

In 1986, the staff of what was then called the UA Physical Plant invented amechanism for inscribing names.

It transformed a job formerly requiring the plant’s entire maintenance crew to one that could performed by just two people, according to Arkansas Democrat-Gazette archives.

The “Sandhog” boasted a hand-guided sandblaster, according to an August 1995 article.

To date, the more than 3 miles of concrete display more than 140,000 names, UA officials said.

The university’s production of graduates was not the only change that complicated its Senior Walk.

CLERICAL ERROR

After passage of the federal privacy law for students - the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act of 1974 - the Fayetteville campus had to exercise more caution in information it released about students. Officials determined they first needed the students’ consent before etching their names in the walk.

That’s where the clerical error that led to the missing names from Senior Walk 2012 comes in, Dawson said.

UA incorporated its consent for Senior Walk into itsapplication-for-graduation process, he said.

This allows students to signal a year or two before their expected graduation, so the university can begin making sure they’re on track.

The process gives the students a chance to state a preference for how they want their names to appear on the walk, Dawson said. Graduate students get to list the degree they earn, as well.

For the 2011-2012 class, “We were transitioning from a totally paper-based graduation application process to one that would be totally online,” Dawson said.

When workers began collating the paper applications with those done online through the campus’s student-information system, some of the names were omitted.

There were 4,631 graduates who finished in 2011-2012, but 98 didn’t consent to have their names released, thus the 4,533 names that will be engraved.

These days, the cost of producing Senior Walk for each class ranges from $350,000 to $375,000 a year, according to a Friday news release.

That covers the design and construction of the specialized sidewalks as well as stenciling and sandblasting the names.

Starting from scratch on the walk this year will add about $75,000 to the cost, university officials said.

Coleman recalls that when she was looking at colleges, she found no other with a Senior Walk like UA’s.

“I did my research - it is the only one,” said Coleman, now a student at the University of Nebraska’s College of Law in Lincoln. There, she said, “I look down at the sidewalk and it’s blank. I expect to see names.”

For the 12 hours she thought her name might not be immortalized in Fayetteville, “It was kind of a reminder of how much this walk means to students,” she said.

Northwest Arkansas, Pages 9 on 04/27/2013

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