NORMAL — Students and alumni of Illinois State University seem to have one common message for university planners: “Fix the Bone.”

Several people speaking Thursday at a forum on the ISU master plan urged the university to renovate the Bone Student Center into a building that can be a “focal point” for students and more welcoming to alumni and local residents. The student center was built in 1973 and named for former university President Robert Bone.

“Every campus needs an ugly building, but let’s not make it the Bone,” Rebecca Rossi of Normal said Thursday.

Rossi, an ISU graduate and adjunct instructor, was among 200 people who provided her opinion on what the campus needs in the next 10 years.

The meeting at the Marriott Hotel and Conference Center in uptown Normal ended three days of collecting comments on what the university and surrounding community want to see in campus growth and improvements.

ISU graduate Lora Ferraro of Normal said the student center is a perfect building to use to bridge the gap between the campus and the community.

“Sure, it is a college campus, but part of this planning is looking at how they want to make it friendlier to involve the community,” Ferraro said. “They should reconfigure the Bone to make it more welcoming to those in the community.”

Joe Lesiak, a junior at ISU, said the student center needs to be a friendlier place where students can study and meet. The building houses Braden Auditorium, Brown Ballroom, other meeting spaces, eateries and various stores and services.

“It’s the focal point of the university,” Lesiak said. “The aesthetics of the building need to be updated as well as what it has to offer.”

Doing more to cater to graduates was another suggestion on the minds of former students and faculty.

“Alumni have a tendency to feel lost when they come back because of the changes,” said former faculty member and ISU graduate Lucille Buscher of Normal. “It can be a fractured experience.”

Dan Layzell, ISU vice president for finance and planning, said the comments collected during the three meetings will be used in a yearlong process of updating the campus master plan drafted in 2000.