The Suffolk Journal received Citation No. 1 for noncompliance with our “Office Space Lease Agreement” as we were finishing up our production of this newspaper last night.

The Student Leadership and Involvement office has created a (mostly) effective way of dealing with the fact that almost all clubs on campus now have office space in the Donahue building, which is to make sure that the space is being utilized as well as it can be by those clubs.

Certain specifications for office use were laid out by SLI earlier in the year and every club president was forced to sign a “lease,” set up an account on the brand new and dysfunctional SUConnect, and maintain what was deemed a “professional” atmosphere, among other things that were almost certainly taken with a grain of salt by most, if not all, clubs on campus. Yeah, sure. We’ll keep the office neat as a pin… or at least as clean as our dorm rooms.

As one of the larger clubs that was fortunate enough to get their own space, the Journal staff has treated its office with respect. We work late hours (sometimes until 1 or 2 a.m.), we eat here, we do our homework here, we call our mothers, check our email, goof off between classes, and sometimes even nap. But the place is clean. We clean it.

So the fact that there is maybe a water bottle or two lying around, or if the computer paper is stacked willy nilly next to the printer, what difference does it make? This is a college. We are college students. And getting threatened with losing our office space because the “printing area” looks “unprofessional,” is hugely frustrating – seeing as we aren’t professionals. We’re students. And if the rest of the office looks fine, who cares if the printer looks unprofessional? It’s a printer.

In addition to our allegedly messy printing area, we were cited with not posting office hours and not spending the minimum five hours a week in our office. Well, we were not only told by adminsitrators working in SLI that we were immune to the office hours rules because we’re always here. At absolute minimum, someone is in the Journal office close to 20 hours per week. Yet, we have still recieved a bright orange paper that says if we don’t clean the printer by Friday, we will recieve a second citation.

No club, the Journal included, should be being threatened with these completely juvenile “citations” for messy printers and the like. C’mon SLI… that’s just silly.