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Brother, Can You Spare a Parking Space?

November 17, 2011, 6:36 pm

We hear about these cases every now and again: Someone stumbles onto an archaic law that has somehow escaped the scrutiny of local officials, remaining on the books for many generations.

In Lincoln, Neb., home to the University of Nebraska’s flagship campus, the local planning department is weighing changes to a city ordinance that calls for fraternities to have more parking spaces than do sororities, reports the  Lincoln Journal Star. What is surprising about the Nebraska law is that it was written in 1979, nearly 60 years after the 19th Amendment gave American women the right to vote.

“Presumably, more college-age men than women drove cars” in that not-so-long-ago era, the Journal Star helpfully suggests.

A Lincoln lawyer, Parry Andrew Pirsch, asked planners to remove the discrepancy when a fraternity that he advises had trouble finding enough parking spaces for a 110-year-old bed and breakfast that it plans to renovate.

The proposed change would require both fraternities and sororities within 600 feet of a university to provide half a parking space per resident and those beyond 600 feet to provide three-quarters of a parking space per resident.

But the newspaper points out that the change will not apply to existing houses unless they expand or rebuild. They’ll be, ahem, grandfathered.

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  • awegweiser

    Its Nebraska – what do you expect? They still believe we are in the 19th Century and Little House on the Prairie and tend to vote that way. 
    Except for the Ethanol subsidies, of course.

  • tenured_radical

    This law is not only intended to restrict student parking, it is intended to restrict the expansion of student-run living spaces full of rowdy men.  Gosh, I wonder why?

  • mbelvadi

    To take issue with a quotation in the last paragraph, universities don’t have values. People have values. Anyone who has been through a round of “strategic planning” or drafting a new mission statement for their university quickly realizes that so-called institutional values are only what those currently in “power” in that institution at the moment hold. As the leadership (including senior faculty) changes, the values change.  That’s why it matters to a public good who is given leadership power within it, because it seems an increasing number of academic “leaders” embrace an anti-public good philosophy, favoring a supposedly “market-based” approach instead.

  • antiutopia

    Neh… it’s hard to define how the university is a “public good” because it works that way to numerous sectors — general public, economic, governmental.  I mentioned on another thread that OSU is hiring people in the area of Somalian studies.  That’s not a public good in any obvious sense to most people, but it can clearly help the US State Dept. and intelligence agencies, so serves as a public good in that way.  Military laser research carried out by state u’s isn’t an immediate public good for most of us (except for how it might help health care), but it supports national defense.  On the other hand, the training of K-12 teachers and future college and university professors is an immediate public good for everyone.  Having a generally educated populace is an immediate public good for everyone.  

  • 3rdtyrant

    The notion of serving “publics” is enormously problematic.  Once a university, whether in Seoul, Lichtenstein, Accra, or San Salvador begins to give itself over to serving the immediate needs of a group of contextual publics, It becomes something less that universal.  The assumption that may need defending is that human (i.e. public) goods transcend individual cultures, and that to begin to cater to cultural necessity rather than human necessity is to relegate the “university” to be the “locality.”  While I understand the immediate benefit of such comparative micro-adaptation, I remain unconvinced that such adaptation is, itself, a way to serve humanities at large rather than serving a narrow (relatively speaking, again) group.

    If we agree that human issues transcend culture, no such adaptation should be necessary, and universities ought to be addressing human issues that, whether in Oklahoma, York, Oslo, Budapest, Hong Kong, Sydney, Johannesburg, or Minsk, remain relatively static.

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