First Bureaucratic Victim of Post VirginiaTech Environment

A sophomore at Valdosta State University was expelled after criticizing his university’s plan to build two new parking garages with student fees.

In a letter apparently slipped under his dorm room door, Ronald Zaccari, the university’s president, wrote that he “present[ed] a clear and present danger to this campus” and referred to the “attached threatening document,” a printout of an image from an album on Barnes’s Facebook profile. The collage featured a picture of a parking garage, a photo of Zaccari, a bulldozer, the words “No Blood for Oil” and the title “S.A.V.E.-Zaccari Memorial Parking Garage,” a reference to a campus environmental group and Barnes’s contention that the president sought to make the structures part of his legacy at the university.

Cited as additional evidence was “a link he posted to his Facebook profile whose accompanying graphic read: “Shoot it. Upload it. Get famous. Project Spotlight is searching for the next big thing. Are you it?”” Which seems obvious to anyone I should think to be referring to filming, and not guns.

Now it seems obvious that the university overreacted here, however, were they even justified at all? Can calling the garage the “Zaccari Memorial Parking Garage” be considered an underhanded threat? Buildings are named for living people all the time, (just ask Robert Byrd), but I think the Memorial part is always used posthumously. Rather than investigate further, the university decided to simply expel the troublesome student. Couple that with their seemingly illiterate reading of the other “evidence”, and it seems obvious that the zero tolerance policies have struck again.