Walking to class never seemed like such an adventure as it does now. What last year was just a bit tedious is now something to game plan around and steel oneself for the journey. Despite the chronically bad parking that has recently and seemingly always plagued Washburn, one could naturally rely on the idea that coming to class less than an hour before hand would not be such a big deal.

Now move to today, where parking as much as two blocks away seems to be more accepted and commonplace. The average student doesn’t mind the walk so much as they mind receiving the tickets from the city and campus police. It seems like in this tough economy that everyone is standing with a hand out trying to reach into your wallet or purse for hard earned dollars. All this takes place against the backdrop of increases in tuition (however small it might be) and the misspent money on improving the aesthetic appearance of an area that is universally reviled for the price gouging that is perceived to take place in the cafeteria and corner store.

It’s not even the tickets or the tuition itself that bothers students so much as that the average student just wants to be respected more so than anything else. Students pay a lot of money and spend a large amount of time on campus working hard to produce, among other things, a quality product such as this publication.

What kind of message does the university wish to send when punishing, however small, students who go the extra mile and put in long hours late at night to put forth a product that will ultimately reflect the university to other people around the state and country?

While some policies should be interpreted as absolutes (no matter how much you want to, don’t run over senior citizens) others should be guidelines where common sense can be allowed to prevail. How parking close to the building that one needs to be near in order to keep the late night walk to the car as short and safe as possible should be a punishable offense strains the ties of credulity.

The real question campus police should ask in most situations is what is going to be in the best interest of the student body. One unoccupied car in an empty parking lot on a campus that doesn’t charge for the privilege of parking there is really a petty way to approach the enforcement of law no matter how trivial the rule might be perceived as. The only thing students ask is that the authorities stop and think before they act.