Take Back IU has real concerns

The Take Back IU petition is a serious step in cleaning up the University.\nWhile petitions often have little effect, Take Back IU sends a message. IU's academic standings are declining even as tuition rises. The quality of life in campus housing is in decline. And the firing of Bob Knight was under suspicious terms.\nThese circumstances point to the administration. Our music school is running in the red. The College of Arts and Sciences budget is unbalanced, and our faculty is underpaid. The administration can't sort out the budget, no matter how many fees pop up on the bursar bill.\nStudents' pocketbooks are being emptied, professors are leaving and the administration is upsetting the alumni.\nIt's obnoxious that IU students are in debt for a second rate education while IU president Myles Brand is making $272,000 per year and will get a raise.\nI don't believe IU is better off now than it was when Brand arrived six years ago. It's time we acted to turn our school back into a first-rate institution, and the petition is a fine way to start. It sends a message: Shape up or ship out.\nThe only problem with the Take Back IU Petition petition is it came directly after Coach Knight's firing. Granted, if Knight hadn't been fired, this petition never would have existed.\nBut in this case, the ends justify the means. If it took the firing of a popular figure to straighten this university out, then so be it.\nThis petition should have been filed before we lost the fifth chemistry professor in five years, before IU fell into the second tier of universities, before the music school fell into the red, before the board of trustees broke the spirit of the law and met to fire Knight, before the golf course controversy, before the community college debacle and before more freshmen were forced to live in overcrowded dorms.\nBut it is never too late to effect positive change. Stand up, tell Brand and the boys to fix IU and sign the Take Back IU petition.