Cabrinilindsa newwayto pesteritsstudents

For one reason or another, driving down the turnpike on my way to school last Tuesday seemed a little different this year. The drive, which usually takes two hours, was halted to a slow crawl in New Jersey by a tractor-trailer that was too tall for an underpass and had the roof of both the cab and trailer ripped off and most of the debris scattered on the road and on two cars. It was a pretty scary scene and due to the amount of damage to the innocent C,iUS, I was pretty happy that the accident I was in a few days earlier had me walking away and only having to pay a few hundred dollars for repairs.

I began to ponder if this was going to be a sign from God telling me that I had a rough road ahead. I thought of what Cabrini meant to me and how it had affected my life in the past two years. I laughed, and said to myself, "What am I kidding myself?" Cabrini has helped me learn that the real world is a whole different world than high school and that college tends to really suck sometimes.

I started to worry about school, and in a matter of minutes, I was almost ready to either tum around or just stop on the side of the road. Unfortunately, in no time at all, I was heading down the Blue Route. This is known as the point of no return in my eyes.

Later that day, I sat in my room and wondered were my roommate was and then I just kind of sat there thinking again. I know it was a bad idea, but I did it anyway. I thought that it could not be that bad. All of my friends were back at school-none of them had been kicked out-but I was surprised to find out that the majority of ·my friends were not allowed to come into the buildings. It puzzled me at first, but then I got the real "shocker.'' Almost every person that I had been friends with was on probation. It was confusing. Appparently, they were on probation because they had too much damage to their rooms. Sounded to me like somebody needed to explain this to me.

Apparently, if a srudent had reached over $250 dollars in damages to their rooms, then they were placed on the newly founded Residence Hall Probation. This was most of my friends and more or less everybody living in house six the year before.

So it was brought to my attention that this policy was passed without the knowledge of any other srudents. And what makes it best is that the policy was passed in June. For some reason, the students that had the high fines from the spring semester of 1998 fell under this new policy. That's baloney. I do not think that this new policy should affect the students that had high fines. book. When I looked closer, I realized that the prices on all of the fines had gone up. So I decided to take a little walk to our friends at Public Safety. There it was explained to me that the school had to use up all of the previous tickets that were from last year-like they did not use them up all last year-and when they were all done with the old ones, they would start issuing the new revised tickets with gold trim.

I think what is funny is that the school is always taking our money. Laura already touched upon the money figures that the school has. What I do n,otunderstand is were all of this money goes.

I thought it was even better to learn that public safety could stop me for any of the following moving violations: Turfing, blowing a stop sign, uninspected motor vehicle and DUI, just to name a few. To go with those, the price of those fines range from $50 to $100.

Loquitur is established as a forum for student expression and as a voice in the uninhibited, robust, free and open discussion of issues.

Joe Elliott

My friend Mike got fined over $1000 dollars for his room. According to Cathy Caulfield, the resident life director, Mike had one of the highest fines in the entire school.

A big question that he had was that it made no sense that he was fined so much. When he received the fine, the school could not offer any reason for the fines. So Mike was placed on Residence Hall Probation.

Mike also wanted to comment that he was fined for new locks and a key to his previous room. The funny thing is that he was charged a lot of money. According to the student handbook, the fine for a re-key lock job is $35-85 dollars and to replace the lock is anywhere between $150-175 dollars. That's a lot of money in my eyes. What makes this story unbelievable is that on Wednesday afternoon Mike went to his old room and was able to key into the room with the key that was supposably replaced, according to the list of fines.

Another thing is that the school is raising tuition and just robbing us of our money. It does not stop there.

Just the other day, I received a ticket on my car. Sure, I admit that I was at fault for the ticket, but it was the second day of school. Just leave me alone. The best thing about this ticket was how neatly it was written. At first, I thought that I was receiving a ticket for every fine in the

So basically Cabrini College just got richer over the summer, so instead of making my life miserable, start making it better by giving me more than a bunch of tickets and fines. Why don't you force the bookstore into giving me a break on the prices of books?

So the other day I went to the book store and spent $274.46 on books. I could not even buy all of them. Now that is a lot of money for a student to have to pay for some books that are going to be returned in a couple of months for not even half of the sellback price.

I think that Cabrini has no priorities set. All they care about is making sure that they have a lot of money and that they look good. They are constantly making sure that the flowers are fresh for the parents and that the facilities are stateof-the art for the board of trustees to see. When it comes to the students, we constantly get jacked on all the things that we should get, like better cafeteria food, better registration procedures to cut the lines down, a friendlier attitude and a more willing staff that will not hide behind others when it comes time for them to answer questions.

I think it is time for the school to start growing up. It is kind of funny that it is hard to get a straight answer from the faculty, instead of them passing the buck on the hard questions and fighting about who gets credit for the good things.

Just remember, Cabrini, you would not be a school without us.

JoeElliottis a juniorEnglish/communication majorandistheperspectiveseditorof Loquitur.Heis frequentlymistakenforthe secondcomingof Christ.

Thumbsupandthumbsdown

On finishing the renovations of the cafeteria before the students arrived at school.

On making sure that the food in the cafeteria is still just as bad as it was last year.

On raising the prices on everything from tuition and parking tickets to candy and pretzels in the gathering area. compiled