Keep Cole Hall

By Ken Arnold

The below was already sent to Sen. Dan Rutherford, and St. Reps. Joanne Osmond and Sandy Cole:

I read today of the MADNESS involved with a proposed tear down of the Cole Hall at NIU. It seems to me that administrators are using the dead bodies of some of their students to try to strong arm State taxpayers (and yes...that's who ultimately would pay) to have a nice, shiny new building on campus. This is an outrage on so many levels!


WHAT REPUBLICANS SHOULD IMMEDIATELY DO:

One of two public positions that a majority of both State Reps and State Senators of the Republican Party should issue is a joint press release on:

OPTION A: Just call the whole thing for what it is while expressing grief about the tragedy. Remind the public that these students and their parents have struggled to pay the taxes and pay the school tuition to SEND their kids to school -- and in their memories they would not want to INCREASE FURTHER these hurdles to a higher education for others by demolishing a perfectly good building and spending $40 plus million to build a replacement!

OPTION B: Do all of option A. However: If required to capture 90% of all Republicans to sign onto this joint press release, go with spending 10% of the projected cost of this new building (i.e. $4 Million) on funding academic scholarships to NIU in the names of those who died in this tragedy. This is FAR LOWER IN COST and does not involve an utter waste to the society at large that the current proposal to tear down a perfectly good building does. In fact: It is a net benefit in slightly lowering the barriers in our State to a higher education that benefits us all.


CONCLUSION:

This whole concept of tearing down buildings and wasting society's precious resources because of the acts of madmen has got to stop! If our parents, or grandparents who knew of lean times themselves would hear this, they would tell us one thing: "Are you NUTS?" Society's resources are always limited. And we must use them wisely and frugally.

I hope that sanity prevails...but give recent Illinois history I fear it will not.