Some things are given constants in the universe. Taxes are always too high. Michigan always sucks. Parking your car at Ohio State is impossible to do if you are a student. We’ve all heard the complaints about student parking on campus. Parking on campus has always been crowded, and more and more people who need the spots aren’t able to get them. The “C” lots are usually filled with students who are just too lazy to make the drive from Norwich Avenue to south campus or who are afraid of “going bus.” As such, commuter students are being pushed off campus.But I have a new solution to this everyday problem. I have noticed that a large number of spaces on campus are “A” and “B” spots, reserved for faculty and administrators. As they park on campus, students are forced onto the “very close and easily accessible” West Campus lots. This is the way it has always been and nothing can be done, you say?Let me take you away from campus for a moment. When I worked my summer job at a go-kart track in high school, I parked in an unlit and overgrown parking lot in the back while the customers parked in the concrete lot in the front. Did I complain? No. If I did park in the main lot, I probably would have been fired. The customer has preference over the employee. That is a basic business principle. As I leave malls, I feel bad seeing store employees running in snowstorms to their cars at 11p.m. Women in skirts and heels slip and slide to the very back of the mall parking lot as male customers walk to their car in the front row. Employees do not take up the first five rows of spots. The paying customers would not stand for that. The point should be clear. Customers always have the right to the best available parking spots in every business. Not one business I know of allows its employees to take the best spots of the parking lot. No business, that is, except OSU.Make no mistake. As students, we are all also customers of OSU. I pay good money – hard earned money – to come here. Professors and other university employees are not customers of the university, they are employees. As such, they should yield the right to park on main campus to the paying customers. The faculty is only here because students pay for them to be here.But, OSU claims, the Campus Area Bus Service and well-lit West Campus lots make parking on West Campus the same, or even better, than parking on the main campus. Now I ask you, how many administrators or professors do you think park over on this wonderful lot and ride the bus to their office? The bus service is nice and slightly convenient. So why should faculty feel bad about riding it the same way students are forced to now? With USG ushering in its newly elected president and vice president soon, I think this is an issue that should be discussed. It will not be, because students are afraid of the administration and will usually take what the university gives them. Students will not even consider asking the administration to switch parking places, lest we offend them. Imagine a customer afraid of the employees and employees pushing customers to the outskirts. This sounds like a business that is not being run very well. Sadly, maybe it is.
Aaron Wiegand is a sophomore finance major from Mansfield, Ohio.