The Exponent


11/27/01	5 day quick link 11/26 \| 11/20 \| 11/19 \| 11/16 \| 11/15

Financial loss teaches students lesson

Despite our fears last semester that the rewarding of students who turned in friends and classmates for cash would turn into a McCarthyism-style witch hunt, there were only 12 prizes awarded.

Where we expected widespread arrest numbers from the hundreds of demonstrators, there were only 18.

Math time: $75,000 in damages, plus $23,350 in rewards for information on eight students, plus legal fees to arrest and convict 13 students out of hundreds. No, that's not totaling up to an inefficient investigation or overspending by our University.

There's a message in those numbers. The University didn’t just take that much of a financial loss. They bought something with it. Eight example trials and convictions to show us what will be done if similar acts occur this year.

More than $100,000 spent cleaning up our mess.

The announcement of the amount given in rewards now, in November, for an April Fool's Day incident, is timed early in basketball season and late in football season to be a reminder in the back of our minds what should happen if we get too rambunctious this year.

It's a warning shot, given early enough so that we might see that Purdue promised to prosecute offenders and reward informants and then did just that.

And now a precedent has been set. If we, as students, choose to have another spontaneous "celebration," the aftereffects will not be so spontaneous.

Destructive demonstrations have almost become an unfortunate tradition in the spring, but the University is creating a new tradition, one that will deal with the practitioners of the old tradition.

Let's hope there's never a need for either of them again.

n Editorial Board: Keith Thomas, Tom McHenry, Erica Sagon, Matt Poston, John Wakefield, Shawn McGann.

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