The sky is falling, the sky is falling, but Jim Harder doesn’t seem to care.

This is no tale of Chicken Little. After a six-inch diameter piece of limestone fell off the east side of the Holmes Student Center tower last week, Harder, the vice president of Business and Operations, said that the falling debris was “nothing to be unduly concerned about.”

Apparently at NIU, safety gets thrown out the window, as well as falling debris.

But if that piece of stone fell just a foot over, it could have hit someone and caused serious damage. The university wouldn’t treat the falling stone so casually if someone was slapping the university with a big fat lawsuit.

In 1987, stone was falling off the student center and the university had the good sense to section off the part of the center where students could have wandered and been conked on the head by a piece of falling debris from the decrepit old student center.

It originally cost NIU $2.4 million to reclad the student center. Now it’s going to cost $10,000 more to make it safe. But it’s worth the money to make the campus safe.

Maybe NIU administrators should go and stand under the student center and see how safe they feel.