Backed by the state of North Dakota, North Dakota State is making plans to build a wall around the University of North Dakota.
The plans to separate UND from North Dakota comes after students have been acting as hooligans and disrupting the peace of surrounding communities. North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum said, “The wall is necessary to prevent students from leaving UND to destroy the rest of North Dakota.”
The movement comes after last year’s attempt to push UND into the Minnesota side of Grand Forks. The push failed after Minnesota filed to build their own wall along the North Dakota border to keep UND students from going back to Minnesota.
“We are taking advice from the Trump administration on the type of wall that would be best to keep people out,” Burgum said. The wall will span along I-29 and from I-29 to the Minnesota border around Grand Forks.
Jane Smith, a freshman in psychology, said, “I’m excited for construction on the wall to begin and it’s just going to be nice not having UND students around anymore.” In the past year, UND students have been the cause of 80 percent of disruptive complaints from surrounding communities and 93 percent of complaints from NDSU. Gov. Burgum said, “It’ll be interesting to see how North Dakota grows without the addition of UND students in the communities.”
The wall will cost $8 billion to build and will have solar panels attached to provide energy to the rest of North Dakota to compensate for UND’s incompetencies. It will be built 25-feet tall and made of metal so that the walls cannot be climbed over or under.
President Trump told Fox News that he “would build a great wall, and nobody builds walls better,” and recommended that UND pay for the wall to be built. Mark Kennedy, President of UND, is disappointed in the actions that NDSU is taking against UND and said he “will not allow UND to pay for such a thing.”
Construction is set to begin August 2018 if enough money can be raised by NDSU to fund the wall, and it’s projected to be finished by the summer of 2020.
NDSU President Dean Bresciani said, “Engineering students will work on the wall for class credit and it will provide real-world opportunities for our students.” Students who are from Grand Forks who attend NDSU will be provided housing during the summer in Fargo so that they can’t pick up on the horrible behavior of UND students.
“Once the wall is completed no more students will be able to choose to enroll at UND. UND will be taken over by NDSU and will act as a separate school and housing for incoming freshman,” Bresciani said.
Burgum assured that non-students will not be punished for living in Grand Forks and will be provided a pass that would allow them to freely come and go from Grand Forks as they please.
Minnesota Governor Mark Dayton was not able to comment on whether Minnesota would build a gate to allow non-student residents out of Grand Forks.