It’s refreshing to know the Department of Public Safety cares about students enough to guard them from the perilous after-dark campus locale known as Lot 16.
In an act of great foresight, DPS has taken the initiative to start ticketing cars in the parking lot on East 14th Avenue and Kincaid Street after midnight. DPS Capt. Herb Horner shed light on the reason: “We didn’t feel it was a good place for students — good, clean, sober students — to be parking and then, at 2 in the morning, having to come out after bars close and having to deal with people who were drunk and obnoxious and misbehaving. We didn’t think it was a good fit.”
The library parking lot is central to preserving the divide between those who work and those who drink. On any given night, good, clean, sober students exiting Knight Library in the wee hours of the morning are forced to mix with the inebriated heathens stumbling home from campus bars. As the wholesome, sober scholars weave their way through the dimly lit parking lot back to their vehicles, they risk exposure to the dark and seedy underbelly of college culture, where one is likely to encounter a veritable bevy of intoxicated hoodlums who want nothing else than to ruin the lives of the sagacious Knight Library denizens. 
Library-goers can’t handle the ugly forces of peer pressure and could easily succumb to the brutal jocks loitering in Lot 16, trying to prolong their inebriation after the bars close. And, as we all know, when these two colossal forces collide, the scene is seldom pretty: Textbooks, calculators and pocket protectors lay strewn across the parking lot, the lone testament to the fracas from the night prior. The broken spirit bottles line the sidewalk parallel to the broken spirits of the academics who managed to make it home.
And, would you believe it, this happens every night. Are you scared yet?
What sort of world would we live in if our library-goers were accosted by the likes of anti-academic bar-goers?
Clearly, walking is the only acceptable method of nighttime transportation because it certainly doesn’t leave people open to attack.
Without any pesky cars in the way, library-goers can take the most direct route home. Sober scholars don’t have time in their studies to walk around cars. We cannot allow anything to interfere with their rest before another long night of studying. After all, if there’s one thing we learned from Math 111, it’s that the shortest distance between two points is a straight line.
But why stop at closing the parking lot? Students who bike to the library have just as much of a chance of crossing paths with a walking bottle of tequila as those who drive. DPS should ticket all bikes left at the Knight Library bike racks after dark. For their safety, we must ensure the scholars remain on foot.
An empty parking lot is just what the University needs to spruce up its image. And think of all the fringe benefits.
For stoners needing a change of scenery from Pioneer Cemetery, Lot 16 is the obvious answer. Plus, 7-11 is right down the street.
It’s clear the University likes to keep things under wraps, and administrators need a bigger place to dispose of those silly public records requests, inexplicit contracts and other important documents. Conveniently, Lot 16 is big enough for a bonfire pit. We probably would have been livid if we’d seen the Frohnmayer/Bellotti contract. Ignorance is bliss.
For the security and freedom of the University campus, that scholars and drunkards may endure to future generations, and for the wisdom, foresight and knowledge to grasp at the future and deliver this parking lot from the occluded depths of being parked in at night, let’s give DPS a generous round of applause: Tomorrow may not have existed without you. Your guidance has taken us, and Lot 16, through the darkest night, like two headlights attached to a car that can’t park in Lot 16 after midnight anymore.
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