With students welcomed into 1999 by a giant snow storm that walloped the area, it seemed that our worst suspicions about Winter Quarter were confirmed.The quarter is generally regarded as the least enjoyable because of the weather, but some other events solidified its reputation as the most dreadful 10 weeks of the school year. With two shooting deaths amid a rash of crimes in the area, Ohio State beginning a major shift away from its land grant mission and three developers’ unveiling some truly awful proposals for Campus Partners’ south campus redevelopment project, it seemed the only good news this quarter involved Buckeye sports victories.Nationally, it was the same old story ad nauseum: Clinton faced a scandal but squeaked away relatively unscathed, we bombed Iraq again and again and the Serbs continued brutally suppressing an ethnic minority in defiance of the international community. In the state, we were introduced to a new governor with a familiar-sounding name, who brought back the time-honored tradition of government-sanctioned murder.In the campus area, the shootings were definitely the most frightening events we have faced in a while. The deaths of Patrick Pryor and Loretta Long were a wake-up call that crime sometimes strikes randomly and brutally. The three robberies that followed further proved that crime is a fact of life in a city, and a university doesn’t insulate students from reality.Students’ reactions revealed both our best and worst sides. Many finally began to do the simple things that can prevent crime, like locking doors and not walking alone at night. Some said they were going to buy guns, the wrong move in a climate of fear. Thankfully, police did their job and arrested a suspect in a relatively short period of time. The biggest news, although mostly ignored by students, was the beginning of some major changes in the way OSU is ran. Still reeling from early decade state budget cuts and with little relief in sight from the General Assembly, OSU has had to increasingly rely on other sources of funding.The endowment surpassed $1 billion, and OSU will obviously continue aggressively soliciting money from alumni. It also looks like tuition is going to be hiked the maximum allowed amount for the third straight year, which, despite its negative impact on students, provides just a small part of the big budget picture.The most proven cash cow is research, and OSU is making becoming one of the top ten research universities in the nation a priority. By tightening its admissions standards and pushing many of the remedial and lower-level teaching responsibilities to branch campuses and community colleges, OSU can improve its rankings and focus its priorities on upper-level and graduate coursework.Another round of college restructuring also looms, merging and cutting departments that don’t fill the university coffers. A proposed profit-based budget system would further cement that reality, by funding colleges according to the amount of money brought in from research grants, enrollment and partnerships with business. Those “partnerships” are becoming more and more evident in places like the business college and the new science and technology campus, which often look like nothing more than branches of corporations. Issued last year, the Carnegie Report warned that increased reliance on research spells trouble for undergraduate education. That’s certainly the way things are looking here, with big business setting our agenda at the expense of areas like the liberal arts. The classroom looks increasingly like the boardroom, a sad truth in a place meant to have a broad range of studies accessible to a broad array of Ohioans under a land grant mission.Instead, OSU claims to be meeting the community outreach aspect of its mission with Campus Partners. This brand of outreach involves kicking out long-time businesses and pushing the poor away from the campus area to build what amounts to little more than a theme park for the rich.The south campus Gateway redevelopment project is part of the new, upscale OSU, with developers’ plans geared toward giving alumni a shiny mall to drive through when visiting. Its high-priced restaurants and retailers will lure them in before they go to a football game in seats taken from students, or a basketball game in the comfy confines of the booze-exclusive Huntington Club.We end the quarter in much the same way it started, as the bluster of winter makes a final stand. With a little luck, we’ll return to the clear skies that bring excitement to spring. The beautiful people who seem like they take refuge in tunnels during these winter months will re-emerge, and the Oval will fill with frisbee-players and preachers surrounded by argumentative crowds.It will also bring an Undergraduate Student Government election and the end of our first year under OSU President William “Brit” Kirwan. We hope that students remember that last year in the spring, students protesting the dismantling of programs for minorities occupied Bricker Hall for nine days.Students must make the changes OSU as a whole is going through just as big an issue this spring. Their effect on the future of the post-industrial United States couldn’t be more profound, with making money becoming our ruling principle and big business overtaking the responsibilities of government.While we leave the snowstorms of the quarter behind, those changes have just begun. We’re slowly becoming more of a factory than a university, one that churns out corporate wage-slaves without a care if they can produce an original thought. Students need to start making noise now, before they forget the things that made this university great.