After more than a year of believing that I was the most broke student on the ISU campus, I opened the paper Tuesday morning to find that I really don’t have it as bad as I thought. The top story of that day’s paper explained that everyone’s favorite criminal, Nick Johnson, was ordered to pay nearly $37,000 to the University Museums to restore the “Ring of Life” statue he was charged with vandalizing last semester. Once again, this decision left yet another ISU student in debt and our fine university laughing all the way to the bank. My major question is what the University Museums plans to do with the extra $35,000 after they finish fixing the statue. My second question is just how important all the artwork on campus is to the typical ISU student?I would guess that, other than the occasional art history major, most students do not even realize that most of it is on our campus. I know that the university uses the art as a selling point to show how beautiful our campus is to incoming students, but once arriving, that is probably not the first thing that comes to the students mind. And I would also imagine that if you took a poll of students and asked them if all the artwork on campus was worth 37 grand, the answer would probably be a resounding no.So how does a judge get off by making one student pay all that money to fix a minor part of one statue that sits unnoticed in the entry to a building. The answer may be that the judge wanted to set an example that senseless acts of vandalism will not be tolerated in Ames or on campus. Obviously he could not have picked a better example. What he has done, in effect, is completely ruined the life of a young man who was set to graduate from college and move on into the real world. As if adjusting to life after college isn’t tough enough for your average young adult imagine trying to pull it off while being $37,000 in the hole right off the bat.And, as if this ungodly amount of money wasn’t enough for the judge’s taste, he threw in a few added bonuses just to try to torture Mr. Johnson even more. He also gets to look forward to paying parole-enrollment fees and court-case fees and to dealing with the looming presence of being on probation for the next five years, as well as serving 200 hours of community service. At least the judge got the last part of the conviction right. The five years of probation will ensure that Johnson will become a law-abiding member of society, and the 200 hours of community service would have been more than enough to remind him that what he did wasn’t a very wise decision. Not to mention that if you take the 200 hours times the hourly wage he would have received for that time, let’s just say $8 an hour, his fine would have been 1600 bucks. Unless we are bringing the ancient Greeks back to life to refinish the sculpture, this should be more than enough to put the kid’s head back on his shoulders.I think it is apparent that Mr. Johnson knows what he did was wrong, but if you really think about it and I bet that most of us have gotten drunk gone out and vandalized something that we found hilarious at the time. If only we would have known that if caught, we would have been outrageously overcharged for our actions, I bet none of us would have done it in the first place. So for all of us who have done something stupid and not gotten caught I think we should all help pay for Mr. Johnson’s actions. If every student at this university sent Johnson about a $1.25, we should all but cover his jacked-up fine and consider our own incidents compensated for.Random acts of vandalism should not be tolerated, but they also shouldn’t cost one student his entire future.