In light of the recent bumper sticker theft, what shines from the professors who owned the stickers are various beams of opinion regarding the motive.
Dr. Wendy Mercier, Dr. Kathy Lee and Mark Hallen all found their political bumper stickers stripped from their doors on September 22.
“Theft should be investigated. It’s illegal,” said Mercier, biokinetics professor.
Although she has taken the matter to Bettie Ann Brigham, vice president of student development, Mercier said that she has heard no official response.
According to Brigham, the adminstration has no leads as to who might be responsible.
“Anonymous vandalism is a very difficult policy violation to confront,” Brigham said.
“One approach we take is not to make too much out of it so as not to draw more attention.”
Mercier found it bothersome that someone would choose to voice his or her views at the expense of her private property.
“I find that theft is an inappropriate way to sound your political voice and alarming if a student at Eastern did so to boost the Republican Party,” she said.
Mercier recently posted a reward sign on her door for $20 in response to the theft.
Lee, chair of the political science department, has had her share of responses to the sign she posted after the theft. The sign welcomed any person who wished to express his or her political voice in a conversational manner.
Lee found her sign ripped to pieces and shoved beneath her door a few days after the incident.
“I put those stickers on my door to voice my opinion,” Lee said. “Yet I don’t think that action such as this needs police interrogation.”
Lee explained that grounds for this type of action are not so much disregard for property as they are rooted in students’ anger.
Like Lee, Hallen, director of theatre, sees the theft as a symptom of a graver disease of unspoken and unheard student voices.
“I have no problem with it,” said Hallen about the theft.
” The issue is that students have no venue to voice their opinions.”
Hallen described students as volcanoes who are boiling with lavas of frustrations and concerns regarding the policies implemented in the societies they live in.
He believes Eastern needs adequate instruments and arenas to ensure that students can release what is brewing deep within their hearts.
Hallen remarked that students feel powerless in teacher-student relationships. Students feel their views are threatened by the power professors exert over them in as simple a matter as grades.
“Jesus was the ideal shepherd,” Hallen remarks, “he let his sheep wonder in freedom. Satan on the other hand wants us to be afraid.
“The same applies to students. They must exercise the freedom Christ has given them to voice their differing points of view. It is in this way that we are the body of Christ.”