An ISU English instructor in the Landscape Architecture Building has been fighting ceiling dust since last spring. Jene Hughes, English 105 teaching assistant, has his office on the first floor of the Landscape Architecture Building. His desk was located under a faulty ceiling that has dumped sawdust on his desk since last January, he said. “Everyday I would come in and there would be piles of sawdust on my chair and desk,” said Hughes, graduate student in English. “I never saw my desk clean.” Some instructors with office space or classrooms in the Landscape Architecture Building said the building has needed repairs throughout the last year. Charles Kostelnick, professor and chairman of English, said 52 teaching assistants and 14 temporary instructors have their office space in the Landscape Architecture Building. Numerous problems in the past few years have made the working conditions a struggle for the English teaching assistants, he said. He said the ceilings are bad throughout the building, and, within the last two weeks, asbestos was removed. He said the removal was needed for safety reasons, but was frustrating for instructors. Kostelnick said the English department painted and fixed some of the building’s holes with their own “sweat equity” four years ago, but the building did not have a full renovation. “We really aren’t budgeted to do a major renovation, so we really rely on people at facilities planning and management when we have problems,” he said. Kostelnick said areas of the building are dated and not at a level he would like for the faculty. “This isn’t a building that gets a lot of attention, and it falls through the cracks because there is no department that is centrally located here,” he said. Hughes said a 3-by-5 portion of the ceiling fell onto his desk over Labor Day weekend. He said he wasn’t upset the ceiling broke on his desk, but the incident could have been prevented. “The point is I could have been sitting there when it fell, and those were big chunks,” he said. The hole in the ceiling still has not been repaired, and there are other problems in the building. “This came in the middle of a prolonged and continuing debate about English TAs’ working conditions,” Hughes said. Late last spring, Peter Rabideau, dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, and Provost Rollin Richmond came to the building and decided there were problems with heat in the computer lab and faulty wiring. Neither of those items have been attended to, Kostelnick said. Kelly Petersen, graduate student in English, has her office on the first floor of the building. She said she likes the space, but improvements are needed. “The university wants excellence, but our students are coming to see us and are not seeing excellence,” she said.