The average IVCC student has witnessed many walks to campus through not so pleasant winter weather. We flock inside with red noses and cheeks and we secretly wish it were more fashionable to listen to your mother’s advice and bundle up in mittens, hats, scarves, and boots.

Then we come inside and walk through a big, long maze of hallways filled with coughing and sniffling students; the staff and faculty are doing the same. Every corner we turn, there is a backpack, a pen, a notebook, or glove shoved into the doors to the courtyard blasting cold air through the open crevice at a constant rate.

We curse the people outside with their cigarettes and some of us (mostly faculty and staff) actually pull the makeshift wedges from the cracked doors, locking the nicotine inclined outside to wait for a sympathetic passerby to open the doors from the inside.

What purpose does the annual door-locking serve?

Larry Rousey, Director of Physical Plant says that they’re trying to eliminate falls on the snow and ice in the courtyard (see page 10). Of course, they do dump tons of salt on every other walkway on campus, so it seems odd that an area as small as the courtyard, in comparison, lacks the ability to be salted or shoveled. Recently, small pathways were, in fact, shoveled from door to door in the interior area, yet the doors remain locked.