In coming to NIU over a year ago, I was under the impression that I would be coming to a place of higher learning. A place where students joined together with open minds in one vast, freethinking community—much like any college. I can see now I was blatantly misguided in my expectations.

This school has one of the most conservative, right-winged, closed-minded group of students I have ever seen. Everybody seems to be looking out for number one, afraid to go beyond their minuscule intellectual realm to see and experience what they never before have.

I say this for an infinite number of reasons, but my focus here is all of the incessant complaining and moaning over Dann Nardi’s sculpture in the MLK commons. Have we nothing better to complain about?

Everybody seems to want a nice, neat, cliched sculpture of King himself and feels that the physical representation of King is more substantial than the non-physical representation, when his mind, words and ideas are what helped bring about changes in the country.

I don’t entirely defend the sculpture myself. However, when Adam Drendel, in Wednesday’s (Oct. 30) letter writes that the statue “… in no way represents what King fought for,” I find myself curious as to which history he refers.

It is all too easy and rewarding to one’s ignorance and lack of ideals to slam the appearance of the sculpture (two funnels, “chia-sculpture”—I’ve heard them all), but in our frantic race to achieve utter closed-mindedness, why don’t we try to forget our hang-up about what’s so damn pleasing and unharmful to the eye, and appreciate what is behind the sculpture in the MLK commons, not what grows on it.

Michael Donohue

Sophomore

English