If you’ve been walking across campus between Hamilton and Catt halls or along Farmhouse Lane at all the past week, you’ve probably noticed all that goes with constructing a new building — the chain-link fence, gravel, excavating equipment and hard hats are all tell-tale signs that work on Troxel Hall has begun.

Increasing enrollment in large lecture classes in all departments means that older lecture halls are insufficient. Larger capacities, such as Troxel Hall’s seating space for 400 students, are necessary. In designing the building, practical needs were combined with commendable efforts to do our part and damage the environment less.

But among the window spaces that will account for 75 percent of daytime lighting, energy-efficient windows, reflective roof and system for purifying rainwater before it becomes groundwater, one of the Hall’s selling points has been its chairs. Like the ones in LeBaron 1210, they are supposed to facilitate group activity.

When was the last time you heard from someone who enjoyed group projects? Normally, one student ends up doing everything out of a near-psychotic need for control, or because nobody else is contributing, or the result is a mediocre project because nobody considered anything beyond their own part of the project’s division of labor.

Our world’s interconnectedness means that dealing with other people and being cooperative is an ordinary part of our lives. But should that fact of life mean that group activities become part of time in class? We think not. Important teaching time is wasted by devoting parts of lectures to grouping students together, setting them to work and restoring order from the resulting chaos.

There seems to be a general attitude among students that their hands will be held through college and they’ll be given everything they need to succeed, but they won’t. They certainly won’t once they’ve reached the real world. It is up to students to take care of themselves and do their work. Devoting time in lecture to group work, just like remedial instruction when the whole class meets, is a waste of time.

If students were interested in getting all they can out of their tuition dollars, they’d demand that lectures be lectures instead of something else. Why should professors take time away from imparting knowledge to paying students?

They shouldn’t. Some professors insist on holding their students as long a possible — until the clock runs out on their appointed time. We won’t mention any names but, if you ask their students, those are the best professors on campus.