Just a day or two before the 2018 – 2019 school year, the main doors of Uni were replaced.

“They were replaced because the existing ones – they were original doors, and they were right at 100 years old,” Uni Business Manager Mike Adams said.

The doors had been worn out over the years due to people yanking them, and the specific day it broke was because a student pulled on the door before they scanned their prox card.

When the door broke, the locking mechanism of the door completely failed.

“[The doors] were not shutting properly, and not locking properly,” Adams said, so people were called in to temporarily fix the doors at night.

The new doors were built from scratch at the University of Illinois Facilities and Services, and it took several months to finish them because they “came and test fitted them, and they had to get them stained,” Adams said.

Although the north and south doors are also a century old, there are currently no plans to replace them. Uni is in discussion with the U of I to change them, but the major factor preventing Uni from purchasing doors “comes down to finances,” Adams said. It is possible that there will be new doors for those entrances in the future.

There have been other changes around the school, such as the wooden floors in the office, and renovations in the WAC lab, like the projector, screen, and window shades.