Is there nothing to be said of tradition any more?

Time and the youth of America were the ones wanting to tear down the walls of our institutions and replace them with the shiny concrete and steel edifices of the modern era.

Now it seems as though it is often the youth who call for tradition. We are the ones who want Veishea the way it was. We want our old dorm buildings to remain standing.

Morrill Hall has been on the Iowa State campus since 1891.

It has been many things to many generations of Iowa State students.

It has been our library and our chapel.

It currently stands as nothing more than a landmark to our university’s humble beginnings — an abandoned eyesore that sits by the Hub like some mammoth house of horror from a gothic novel.

Still it serves as a reminder of another time.

It will take a whole lot of cash to fix it up, but it’s worth it, isn’t it?

Perhaps it is naive to think philanthropy should not depend on having one’s name immortalized in stone.

After all, Morrill Hall itself is an example of one man’s ego plastered on the side of a building for the ages to ooh and ah at, isn’t it?

Maybe as the best land grant university in America, we should try to tip our hats to the man who made land grant universities possible.

In 1862, U.S. Representative Justin Smith Morrill of Vermont proposed that each state be granted 30,000 acres of public land for each senator and representative under apportionment based on the 1860 census for the establishment of a fund for colleges of agriculture and the mechanical arts.

If anybody actually deserves to have his name on a building, it’s Morrill.

The best reason to donate money to a university is to get your name on a building. Fine. Let’s accept the inevitable.

Why not stop depending on one huge donation from a single ego-maniac to get our old buildings renovated.

Why not do a modified version of what we did with Catt Hall?

Take smaller donations and put those people’s names on little pieces of stone. Turn it into a garden dedicated to the thousands of people willing to donate money just to put their name or the name of a loved one on a brick in that garden.

There has to be a way to put Morrill Hall back into working order without changing the central representation of our collective identity.

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Iowa State Daily Editorial Board: Sara Ziegler, Greg Jerrett, Kate Kompas and Carrie Tett.