Last Tuesday morning, I rode to my 9:10 a.m. class on my bike, as I do every morning. When I left class at noon, I came outside to find my bike gone. Immediately, questions raced through my head. Where was my bike? Misplaced? Stolen?

Then it occurred to me, as I saw MSU Department of Police and Public Safety trucks pass by with a trailer full of bikes - my bike had been impounded. My transportation to class and work had been taken. I went straight to the DPPS station where I was told that among the day’s duties, along with giving students $25 parking fines, was impounding all bikes on university “property.”

Two things struck me at this point: First, I was unaware that as a tuition-paying student, I needed a pass to lock my bike to a bike rack on Michigan land-grant property and second, if the Department of Police and Public Safety was as concerned about my safety in the community as they were impounding bikes, which they would later sell at auction, then this would be the safest campus in the nation.

Finally, after paying a $10 fine and learning that I would need to purchase a new lock for the one that the university cut off, I asked the department what it’s explanation was for taking the bikes.

I was given the answer that the university was attempting to clean the campus of the bikes that have been left during the summer.

This brings one to wonder if 11 a.m. on a Tuesday, during summer session classes, would be the best time to clean out the supposedly overly littered bike racks.

I will never understand who this university is trying to support.

I’ve tried to believe that every time I receive a parking ticket for hurrying to turn in a paper, pay an extra 8.9 percent in tuition for classes such as Business 309 (if you took it, you know what I’m talking about), or now when I pay fines to receive back my own property that this university is looking out for me.

I wonder if it’s really just looking out for President M. Peter McPherson and it’s own pocketbooks.

Sarah Gorajek
management senior