Bumper Business

For some 1,500 student car-owners at the College, the spring of 1955 has hardly been an auspicious one. First University Hall placed a dozen undergraduates on probation for "flagrant" parking violations, and then local citizens, led by Councilman Edward J. Sullivan, demanded that the University permit only seniors to have automobiles at school. Together these two events have seemingly jeopardized the undergraduate's car-owning privilege. At the very least they have caused the student to await with apprehension the Administration's next decision on the parking problem.

In this discomforting atmosphere the Student Council's recent parking report comes as a welcome clarification. As the Council points out, the University's toleration of undergraduate cars grew out of the traditional policy that students deserve the same rights as other local residents. Thus the College has limited its automobile restrictions to the single rule that a student must register his car with the University Police. This requirement is reasonable and necessary, but it has often been violated during the past year. To end these infractions, the Council would increase the penalty for failing to register an automobile with the University from $10 to $20. Certainly no student can justly complain against this proposal.

But if the College expects complete student observance of its only automobile regulation, it must in all other respects continue to treat undergraduate car-owners as bona fide local citizens. It should, for example, reduce University parking fines so that they correspond to those of the city, and so that students would no longer derive a financial advantage from keeping their cars unregistered. More important, the Administration should renounce its vague policy of placing undergraduates on probation for indefinite parking violations described only as "flagrant." It should, in the words of the Council, "make a definite statement of the number and types of offenses which could lead to this action." It would thereby eliminate an arbitrary "justice" that could certainly not be applied to local citizens outside the University.

In its forthcoming parking decision the Administration will probably continue the principle of equal rights for students and local residents. But this will be only a provisional solution. The policy's crucial test will come years later, when an expanding University and increasingly congested Square have once again brought demands for an end to the undergraduate's car-owning privilege.