The administration of our university has utterly mis-prioritized, yet again.

As if placing research on an equal or greater plane than teaching and condoning a faculty that only teaches half or less of the time weren’t enough, now the condition of the grass has taken priority over students.

Would the university really prefer intact sod to having students late to class?

The paths cutting across campus are there for a reason. At roughly a mile square, our campus is a big place. It takes a fair amount of time to walk across, a condition compounded by sidewalks that take seemingly insane routes to get from point A to point B. Just try walking in a straight line between any two points other than Beardshear and Curtiss halls. If enough people are walking on a given line to kill the grass and create a path, then perhaps that ought to be an indication that we’re missing a sidewalk in that location.

There is, however, a temporary solution for those of us who oppose the installation of these fences: ignore them. At roughly waist height, these chain fences are much shorter than many farm fences, and therefore easily crossed. In the spirit of Gandhi and King, this is nonviolent protest at its finest.

The fences criss-crossing campus are merely a symptom of a larger issue, however. The real issue at hand is a university administration that can, at times, seem rather disconnected from its students.

These fences should never have become an issue. Facilities planning and management should have known better. Anyone who noticed the paths running across campus could have made the logical deduction that blocking them off would be wildly unpopular, not just for aesthetic reasons but for traffic control as well.

There are other symptoms of this perceived disconnect:

As many of you may or may not know, spring 2008’s spring break occurs the week before the Easter holiday this year. For anyone who plans on spending Easter with your family, there goes your spring break, all due to a set of university rules drawn up years ago, with no allowance made for this rare anomaly.

Our student basketball tickets cost more than some of the regular season tickets. Regular season tickets start at $99. Student tickets (which don’t include ballgames when the university is not in session) are $95. The regular season ticket holders are also guaranteed their seat. Apparently Mr. Pollard forgot that we pay tuition while he was fundraising for the stadium renovation – but that’s another column for another day.

In fact, on the face of things, it would very nearly appear that a great swath of university administration has forgotten that our checkbooks, scholarships and financial aid payments account for nearly one-quarter of this institution’s revenue. The university works for us, and for those of us who are Iowa taxpayers (a group which provides another 28 percent of the university’s revenues), they work for us twice over.

So, where does this all leave us? The bright spot, as shown in the comments given in the Daily’s own article on the fence issue, is that the university is apparently eager to listen.

While this guarantees us nothing in the grand scheme of things, it does allow us recourse. Speak to your GSB senator. Write facilities planning and management. Join the Facebook group. Let them know the students are, at very least, more important than the grass.

– Ryan Frederick is a senior in management from Orient.