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“It’s a $1-million pile of rocks,” said fifth-year student Becky Arnott Friday. “I don’t think you can say it was a good way to spend that money. It’s unnecessary.”

Student union president Raymond Noronha said students were not consulted before or after the project’s approval in the spring of 2012.

“A lot of [students] were frustrated over the fact that $1-million, that could have been spent on various different things on campus to improve them, was spent on the middle entrance,” he said.

Fourth-year student Larissa Ho, who has written about the controversy over the last month in the campus student newspaper, The Medium, said when construction first started on the project, students thought it was just to fix the sidewalks. The student union only found out the $998,000 cost in early April, just as students were heading into final exams, and after her paper’s last issue for the school year.

Despite the controversy, the main entrance was badly in need of a facelift, she said.

“You should have seen the old sign … it was faded from the sun … it looked really crappy. It looked like we were a little high school. This looks a lot nicer,” Ms. Ho said, adding though that she’s still not sure if the university should have paid what it did for it, and could have done a better job getting students’ input.

UTM’s chief administrative officer, Paul Donoghue, was not available for an interview. In an emailed response to questions, he wrote there has been discussion for years about renovating the main entrance, previously marked only by a sign identifying it as the old Erindale College.