The BFC's blunder

I drive a shiny 2005 Honda Civic, and I am working a great deal to meet the monthly payments. It might be a meager and cheap car to many on this campus, but the smooth-finished, blue-painted automobile is my pride and joy. \nAnd every day I am forced to park my little car in the stadium parking lot, or else try to find a small space to squeeze it in around campus, generally between a tiny Mazda Miata parked an inch from the line on the left and a massive LT1 someone's parents bought for them taking up every spec of space it can on the right. It's like trying to fit Marlon Brando into a bathtub, a bit slippery and extremely dangerous (not to mention very ugly). \nI walk away from my car, resigned to the fact that I will probably come back at the end of the day to find my driver's side mirror lying on the ground and my bumper smashed in. I've kept my complaints to myself during my semesters at IU, but I won't anymore -- not since last week's meeting of the Bloomington Faculty Council.\nThe BFC is proposing to restrict the sale of A and C permits to faculty members and graduate students who teach regularly scheduled classes, according to Indiana Daily Student reports. Apparently the frustration of a lack of parking at IU is affecting some faculty members' abilities to be effective in the administration of their courses. (How not being able to find a parking space has anything to do with, say, recalling and analyzing the events at Tiananmen Square and determining whether the students understand it is beyond me, but that's another issue.)\nWhen IUSA President Alex Shortle raised concern for the students' parking situation, an impressive move, what he received was a flippant response from BFC member Craig Bradley, who was quoted as saying, "They would park at the football stadium and ride the buses or ride their bikes ... Whatever."\nWhat really bothers me about this proposal is that it gives the appearance that some faculty members have forgotten to entertain a not-so-far-fetched possibility: that some students work pretty damn hard, some possibly even harder than their professors. It seems as though those who voted to endorse the proposal (the vote was not unanimous among BFC members) are trying to perpetuate the building of a wall between teachers and students. \nWhile such a wall is certainly appropriate in experience (I am not so arrogant to think that students even begin to crack the experience of our professors) and occasionally in the realm of intelligence, to imply that it is applicable in meticulousness is an amazing lapse of judgment. \nThe members of the BFC who voted for the proposal would do well to remember that a university is about the students and the education of those students and not about the convenience of the faculty who run it. We're all in the parking situation together. Deal with it.