Several efforts to rehabilitate the dilapidated campuses have started and stalled through the years.
You can't erase memories of long lines, tasteless cafeteria food, dilapidated dorms or campus jobs that some angry graduates didn't get.
He has also chosen to deliver a speech at Rangoon University, a dilapidated, old campus which was once the most prestigious academic institution in the country, but was emptied of undergraduate students by the military after the mass protests of 1988.
The whiteness that appalls in Stephen L. Carter's stylishly written new novel, "New England White," is only partly the snow, which sifts through the "Gothic sprawl" of the university campus in "grimy, dilapidated" Elm Harbor in the late fall of 2003.
He lived in an off-campus apartment so dilapidated that his wife, Shelley, who was then his girlfriend, still recalls the dirty carpet and crooked shades.
The sprawling campus is pleasant enough but badly dilapidated.
But in recent years, university officials have concluded that the jumble of fast-food restaurants and dilapidated storefronts along the stretch of High Street bordering the campus has made it harder to attract high-caliber students and faculty.
"The big challenge in writing the screenplay was to not make this story the familiar, unimportant, popcorn-type pabulum," he says, sitting in the production offices of his next movie, "Unbreakable," in a vacant, fairly dilapidated, ivy-overrun museum on the edge of the University of Pennsylvania campus.
Again, the kitchen was dilapidated.
"It looked dilapidated," she said.
