With the bungling bureaucracy and the terminal case of committeeitus prevalent here at NIU, many items and problems slip through cracks in the floor, where they stay until a roaring blaze is set under the administration.

Unfortunately, such is the case of the would-be statue honoring Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.

It is truly a shame and yet typical of this university that four years after a decision was made to commission a statue honoring one of our nation’s greatest civil rights leaders, no one on this campus knows the sculptor’s progress on the statue because his studio has no phone.

Even after the committee is able to contact the sculptor, and even after the sculpture is completed; NIU plans to wait until renovation is completed on the commons which bears King’s name. But this renovation date has been set back until the university can scrounge up enough money to pay for the repair work needed on the Holmes Student Center Tower which overlooks the commons.

Assuming hell doesn’t freeze over by the time money to fix the tower miraculously appears in this age of perpetual budget cuts, there is every chance that the money appropriated to upgrade the commons will not be there after the tower’s crumbling face is fixed.

Meanwhile, the statue, honoring one of the greatest Americans of this century, exists only in the dreams of one of NIU’s innumerable committees.

Granted, NIU must take what it can get when it comes to acquiring the large amounts of money needed to repair the tower and renovate the commons. But there is no excuse why a $21,000 seven-foot sculpture of the man that NIU’s commons takes it name from is not completed and dedicated four years after the decision to honor King was made.

King’s memory deserves better—and so do the students, faculty and staff of this university.