By Josh Pater

`Cooking 101'

This past Thursday, Shirley V. Hoogstra, JD, Vice President for Student Life, distributed an e-mail to students regarding the bod book prank. That piece begs for a response.

Where to begin? How about with this claim: ``Pranks are a problem when they create extra costs or cause college property damage.'' Yes and no. Just three years ago Calvin's own Spark magazine printed an article by Professor Randy Bytwerk lamenting the bygone days of pranks at this school. Many of the great pranks he cited as part of college lore certainly ``create[d] extra costs.'' Students once sawed off part of a cupola at the Franklin campus. The replacement was not free, to be sure. Here at the Knollcrest campus, an ingenious group took it upon themselves to tamper with the lights in the FAC so as to render the holding of chapel, then mandatory, impossible. Calvin staff must have spent hours fixing the lights, but that doesn't mean the pranksters were out of line.

The way I see it, if you want to make omelettes, you have to break eggs. The FAC lighting adjustment, as well as the relocation of ``the Cheese'' to the chapel, were a couple of great omelettes. The question then becomes whether too many eggs were broken. I think not. As for the recent ``Names & Faces'' alteration, I'll leave it up to the reader to judge the omelette. But, from what we've been told, very few eggs were broken. Covering a couple of addresses and pictures in a book of 4,500 or so such entries is hardly worth fretting about, especially now that the whole thing is online anyway.

Hoogstra also said the following: ``Students cannot break into unauthorized areas, period. It breaks the trust of this community, wherever it occurs, whether in the residence halls, locker rooms, classrooms or administrative or faculty offices.'' Thus she suggests that the great, hallowed egg of ``community'' was broken. But if it's community with which she worries herself, then her message was a disaster. ``[W]e can pay other students to fix the books, reprint the damaged ones, and charge for the books this time,'' Hoogstra said. I am at a complete loss to understand how threatening the entire student body with having to pay for their bod books furthers community. The same goes for her suggestion that we rat out our fellow students if we know who did it. Not much of a community-building exercise.

The act of withholding the books and handing out threats, topped off with a tired appeal to community, was a mistake. The whole thing reeks of damaged pride and an overreaction. I’m sorry, but administrative pride doesn’t add up to a whole lot of eggs.