A student's 'right to furnish'

College. It's a time for learning, a time for personal growth. It's a time for cheap beer, cheap pizza and cheap sex.\nAnd, perhaps most importantly, perhaps least importantly, it's a time for cheap students to place dirty, moldy old couches on the dirty, moldy front porches of dirty, moldy old houses.\nBut here at IU, we take this final liberty for granted. Not all schools are so fortunate.\nA Sept. 3 Chronicle of Higher Education article relates the plight of the students of University of Michigan. Ever since a dirty, moldy old couch-induced blaze scorched the front of a rental house in Ann Arbor, Mich., that city's local Fire Inspector Douglas Warsinski is cracking down. He wants to ban upholstered indoor furniture from front porches, citing foamy cushions, plenty of oxygen and a general absence of outdoor smoke detectors as fire hazards.\nStudents at the University of Colorado were faced with a similar ban in 2002 after a string of couch fires swept the campus. Warsinski said at least nine other college towns have followed suit.\nApparently, these things are just going up in flames all over the country.\nWhile the combustability of upholstery certainly concerns us, we wonder how much more flammable a sofa becomes once students move it out of the living room and onto the porch. Personally, we'd rather the fire hazards remain outside rather than closer to our bedrooms.\nBesides, having sofas outdoors exposes them to the elements, like rain. Rain is made of water, and, last we checked, water is fairly inflammable. What's up now, fire inspector?\nBut this ordinance isn't about safety. It's about control. It's about a citizen's "right to furnish," and officials in college towns have no right to take that away. If students want to build their coffee tables entirely out of empty beer boxes, they should be allowed to.\nWe feel this is an example of bogus legislation designed to over-regulate a semi-transient student population that city officials know won't stick up for itself. Not that we'd know anything about that in Bloomington.\nJason Mironov, University of Michigan student body president, thinks his constituents are entitled to their "right to furnish," and we agree with him. We think of our own under-supported student government and ask the students of Ann Arbor to help him out by speaking up for themselves. Organize a petition. How about a couch-a-thon?\nWe also hope the city council resists the dangerous precedent set by overzealous couch control.\nWe wonder how Ann Arbor's local population would feel if the fire inspector tried to place similar restrictions on them. After all, who know what kind of risk is posed by those pointy-hatted lawn gnomes?\nAlthough the Ann Arbor city council has tabled the ban indefinitely, Warsinski thinks the extra time will allow proponents to sell the council on the ban.\n"Overwhelmingly it's supported by the public," he said, "but the students are not yet in."\nWe wonder why.