Do you have class on Thursday afternoon or evening? Are you planning on going to next Thursday’s football game against Auburn?
You may have trouble doing both. Classes are not canceled Thursday, even though the campus will be swarming with over 50,000 Bulldog and Tiger fans.
To make matters worse, students will not be allowed to park in their regular zones after 11 a.m., since most parking lots on campus are reserved for fans who have parking passes in those zones.
This is not to say the fans don’t deserve to have a place to park. However, we as students have already paid $95 (an amount that seems to increase every year) for the privilege of parking on campus on class days, and it is clearly unfair to lock us out of those lots on a day when the university is expecting us to be in class.
How can the university say its purpose is education, but then essentially deny access to that education by preventing students from driving onto campus that day?
There is one logical way to solve this parking crisis for the football game: cancel classes.
Sure, it may “look bad” to cancel classes for a football game, but it really would not be a big deal. Classes this semester end on Wednesday, Dec. 1, so by extending the semester one more day, Sept. 9 could be a holiday and there would still be the same number of Thursdays on the schedule.
And we wouldn’t be alone. The University of Alabama is canceling all classes on Nov. 18 for its game against Georgia State and even canceled three day’s worth of classes back in January so students could go to the BCS National Championship Game in Pasadena. All of the missed class days were made up, of course, so no one’s education suffered.
The reality we need to face is that it’s OK to want to go to a football game. There are only seven home football games this season, and three of them are against weak non-conference foes. Thursday’s game with Auburn is one of only four chances this entire year for an MSU student to watch the Bulldogs face an SEC opponent at home, and students aren’t “wrong” if they want to be there.
Coach Dan Mullen has implored students to come to games and to be spirited. The university has celebrated the selling out of student tickets and encouraged us to support the team. Thursday’s game against Auburn will set the tone for the season, and we need every single seat filled with somebody yelling and clanging a cowbell (at the proper times only, of course).
Football isn’t like other sports. There aren’t regular games throughout the week. Non-Saturday games are a rarity for special TV matchups, so who knows how long it will be for another one. Canceling classes on one day for a one-time major event that involves tens of thousands of outsiders roaming the campus will not degrade MSU’s academic integrity.
Thursday’s classes could easily have been made up in December, and the MSU campus doesn’t have sufficient parking for both students and a huge game day crowd. Instead of doing the smart, logical thing and canceling classes, MSU has decided to hang students out to dry.
If the administration insists on holding classes Thursday, the least it could do is make those classes accessible by allowing us to park on campus with our decals.
 
The Reflector editorial board is made up of opinion editor Wendy Morell, news editor Julia Pendley, assistant news editor Hannah Rogers, sports editor Bob Carskadon, entertainment editor Will Malone, photo editor Ariel Nachtigal, copy editor David Breland, online editor Matthew Witbeck, graphic designer Lauren Cochran, managing editor Harry Nelson and editor in chief April Windham.