Snow Day Slip-Ups
By: Eric Schmidt
On Wednesday, February 10, Lehigh had its first snow day in 8 years. For those of us living in hovels, our campus was blanketed with nearly two feet of snow over the course of Tuesday night into Wednesday evening. I have no issue with trudging to class if my university and professors demand it. I honestly have no excuse to not get myself to my classroom that is a quarter-mile down the hill from my dormitory. Students who commute and professors obviously should be held to a different standard. It would have been absurd to demand them to drive to Lehigh on the day of the blizzard. I like our school’s stringent policy regarding holidays and days off. By not giving holidays off, we discriminate against no one. If there is a holiday that you feel obligated to take off then the university, and most professors, are usually more than willing to cooperate, as I found out for Good Friday. My issue is not with the school’s reluctance to give days off but rather the administration’s inability to communicate days off well enough, especially in potentially dangerous situations like massive blizzards.
Students awoke on Wednesday to no mass email alert from President Gast or whomever announcing that school was canceled. Rather, students had to dig through two or three layers of the Lehigh University’s webpage in order to obtain this information. It’s almost as if they wanted to keep this as low-key as possible. Apparently announcing that the school is closed does bad things for the administration’s collective ego: they must pride themselves on being tough guys who demand their students and faculty to report to their posts every day. What ensued from this lack of communication from people whose job it is to communicate, was chaos. Confused teachers arrived at campus to find that there was no parking and that buildings were locked. Really Lehigh? Locking buildings for snowstorms? Is that really an emergency that warrants a response like that? I myself only found out that the university was closed from my Gryphon, who seemed to have been more informed than the heads of some departments. There is a problem with this. One can only hope a real emergency never befalls this campus.
