It isn’t often that we laud the University of Akron, one of our biggest rivals. Especially over oatmeal. OK, OK, so it’s not really about the heart-healthy breakfast food, but there is a connection — stay with us.

In purchasing Quaker Square, the complex of former storage silos and grain mills that produced the aforementioned oatmeal decades ago for the Quaker Oats Co., Akron went a little further by integrating an already urban university into its city.

They added 95 furnished semi-luxury rooms for more than 200 students to call home. They added two restaurants, now run by the university’s dining services. They also added a lot of potential — according to an article in the Akron Beacon Journal, the 400,000-square-foot Quaker Square is the largest facility the university owns.

There’s potential to build offices. There’s potential to build classrooms. There’s potential to get their hospitality management students involved in running a full-service hotel and banquet facility. Currently, the 95 rooms on the bottom four floors are still serving as a public hotel managed by a Fairlawn company, but that agreement is up after two years.

So what does all this have to do with Kent State?

We aren’t an urban university in the way Akron is an urban university. We never will be, and that’s fine. It’s part of our identity. We don’t necessarily need elaborate ideas to link the two. But it wouldn’t hurt to look at the way Akron is getting its students integrated into the downtown.

As it is now, there’s no real reason for our students to go downtown during regular school hours.

A university-owned building with a few classrooms and a lobby coffee shop could help change that. A few classes a day could get scores of students downtown. We have a bus system more than capable of shuttling students to and from campus — they even added more downtown routes this year.

Once people get downtown, there are plenty of places to eat lunch or get a cup of coffee before or after class.

But why stop at getting students downtown only as patrons? Kent State does a good job of finding on-campus employment for those seeking it. The university could expand upon that and form a partnership with the downtown businesses, encouraging them to hire student employees.

More ambitious: We could put some literal meaning to our Excellence in Action declaration.

We have an excellent architecture program. We have an excellent interior design program. If the university purchased property, we could put those programs in action. Let students get real-world experience.

If we really want to go the route of Akron, we do have a historical hotel in Kent, and we have a hospitality management program that could run it.

But let’s not get ahead of ourselves.

It’s hard to demand more shops and restaurants downtown when we aren’t taking advantage of the ones we do have. The first step is Kent State giving its students a reason to go downtown.

The above editorial is the consensus of the Daily Kent Stater editorial board.