Any day now UT and the Tennessee Department of Transportation will start building their four-lane highway through campus.  The construction itself will create traffic snarls, but the finished product is likely to be worse, for it will funnel at least 10,000 cars per day into the heart of a campus already plagued by too much traffic.  What has gone wrong?
     The 4-lane UT connector project was announced in October 1998 by Governor Sundquist and then President Johnson.  The project was the result of a deal made between the transportation department and UT, with no public participation.  Had there been a democratic planning process, the outcome would have been quite different, for it quickly became evident that practically no one on campus wanted this connector.
     During the spring semester of 1999, all the representative student and faculty government organizations publicly opposed the project.  The Faculty Senate unanimously passed a resolution calling for a moratorium on the project until an open planning process could be instituted.  The Graduate Student Association also voted unanimously to oppose the project, and the Student Government Association condemned it by a vote of 38-3.
     On February 11 of last year a group of faculty, staff and students organized a public meeting on the connector attended by President Johnson and representatives of the department of transportation.  All who spoke from the standing-room only audience in the library auditorium—faculty, staff, and students—were in opposition.  Members of the Cherokee Nation, concerned that the road will disrupt ancestral burial grounds and an historic burial mound, also spoke in opposition.
     Later in the spring, a campus poll to which over 300 people responded indicated that about 95% of the faculty and staff favored a moratorium.
     When the project was discussed on April 1999 call-in show on campus public radio station WUOT, all callers opposed it.
     In the April, 1999, student government elections, Ayappa Biddanda, who opposed project, received the plurality of votes as the student representative to the UT Board of Trustees, but the governor chose to ignore this choice and appoint Brandi Wilson in his place.
     Nearly 2000 faculty, staff, students and alumni have signed petitions against the project.
     On September 20, 1999, the Faculty Senate unanimously passed a strengthened resolution calling for complete abandonment of the project.
     On January 19 of this year the UT Daily Beacon published a campus poll indicating that 72 percent of UT students oppose the 4-lane concept, while only 8.4 percent support it.
     This spring, the Student Government Association Senate, the Undergraduate Academic Council and the Freshman Council all passed resolutions against the project by large majorities.
     On February 22, the Executive Committee of the region-wide Metropolitan Planning Organization removed the designation "four lane" from the project in their long-range road plan, thus in effect withdrawing a previous endorsement of the four-lane design.
     On April 3, the Tennessee State Senate passed by a vote of 29-0 a resolution sponsored by Sen. Tim Burchett, calling on the Board of Trustees and the transportation department to reconsider the project.
     Despite all this, the connector will be built.
     There are many reasons for the almost universal opposition to the project.  It was devised without any consultation with faculty, staff, students or the public, and in contradiction to a careful planning process that had already taken place.  The construction will disrupt research and teaching facilities on the Agriculture Campus.  The new road will increase noise and pollution on both campuses.  The quiet, pastoral atmosphere of the Agriculture Campus will be irretrievably lost.  The connecting bridge will overshadow and degrade the character of the much-used Third Creek Greenway.  And by increasing the speed and volume of vehicular traffic on both campuses, the road will decrease pedestrian and bicycle safety at UT, which has what is probably the highest concentration of pedestrians in East Tennessee.
     This connector makes no sense.  Virtually nobody wants it.  Why, then, is the state spending over twenty million dollars to build it?