In yesterday’s The Daily Campus, we reported on the development of a new policy that would require sophomores as well as first-years to live on campus.

Ed Board thinks this is a great initiative, and while it won’t happen until all of us are gone, we have some ideas on how to make sophomore living feasible and fun.

Passive participation is always a hot topic, and we could beat a dead horse with it, but we won’t today. Refer to Tuesday’s Ed Board about passive participation. Residence Life and Student Housing really needs to get rid of those policies immediately, and it will only be exacerbated with 1,500 more people on campus.

Ed Board would really like to see a high-rise apartment-style dorm building built on the old Mrs. Baird’s site. The location is the most logical for many reasons.

First, it is on the same side of Central Expressway as the rest of the campus. Also, this land is located in the city of Dallas, which avoids the hassle of the Park Cities and their building height restrictions.

In addition, this site is close enough to campus to bolster the community feel that administrators are aiming to increase.

While the land is close to campus, it is far enough away that a high-rise could be built that didn’t necessarily fit the same Georgian architecture style as the rest of campus. If a building like that were to be built closer to campus, it would stick out like a sore thumb. Putting a building there gives us options on design.

Mrs. Baird’s would also be a good location because it’s close to the Dedman Center for Lifetime Sports, Ford Stadium, Moody Coliseum and hopefully the George W. Bush library.

While there are no confirmed reports of where the library will go if it is awarded to SMU, Ed Board thinks it should go where the Binkley and University Gardens apartments are currently located.

Another positive aspect to our proposed Mrs. Baird’s apartments is that getting to class could be made very easy with a short reroute of the Mustang Express.

The bus currently drives down Dublin between SMU Boulevard and Mockingbird, and then turns on Mockingbird to get to Bishop Boulevard.

The bus could take a quick left at the light at Airline and Mockingbird, pick up students at the new building and then continue on to Bishop Boulevard.

If SMU really wanted to get fancy, it could build an underground walkway from Mockingbird to Bishop Boulevard that had those moving sidewalks that they have at the airport.

Ed Board is really excited at the prospect of more students living on campus. It will leave a more lasting impression on students’ SMU experience. You have your whole life to live in an apartment, you can only live on campus as a college student for four years.