EDITORIAL: Safety should have been a top concern in delay decision
While many students may have been grateful for the chance to sleep in Monday, CMU’s morning cancellation of classes and delay of on-campus operations was a frankly arbitrary attempt to accommodate weather conditions.
Shortly before 8 p.m. Sunday, University Communications sent out an e-mail announcing campus was closed until noon and that a verdict on the afternoon's status would arrive by 10 a.m. It was a status that, for the time being, was completely appropriate without knowing how well-plowed or icy the roads may have been by midday.
But upon evaluation Monday morning, administrators should have reconsidered their decision to open campus for the remainder of the day. The call was ill-advised and simply irresponsible.
And this is not just because we’re college students who wanted the day off.
By noon the roads continued to appear under-plowed, particularly Broomfield Street and its Michigan lefts, which are critical paths of travel for students driving to commuter lots. Local police chatter buzzed most of the day with minor vehicular accidents. Many instructors even canceled their afternoon classes because of being snowed in.
It was obvious that roads were not ready for such high volumes of traffic, such as the typical flood of cars that pile on to campus each afternoon.
Any student, instructor or CMU staff member who drives in from out of town was forced to leave a considerable amount of time to get to Mount Pleasant. Many may have been forced to stay home, forcing some students to miss class. Lot 33, for example, was at times only half full.
The university ought to thank its lucky stars no one was seriously injured, or even killed, while en route to campus, which could have potentially opened the university up to litigation at its own expense.
For all those who made it to campus successfully after noon, you are troopers.
True, CMU has already had one snow day — something usually seen as a rarity. And Sunday night’s storm was by no means as serious as January’s "snowpocalypse." However, administrators’ logic in reopening campus was perhaps disjointed.
The perspective that at this point in the semester there is no time to waste and students’ education is too important to again cancel classes would in most scenarios warrant the decision to tough out the weather.
However, safety ought to be CMU’s No. 1 priority and a single afternoon of operation is not too much ask. As the cliché goes, better safe than sorry.
