Its no big secret that Skyline looks and feels different then it did in previous years. The biggest most obvious change is the reconstruction and replanting of Skyline. Coincidently, it’s my favorite change so far.

Even I was skeptical at first when I returned to my beloved campus for a new semester only to discover all the plants had been uprooted, new cement were just being laid out, and the only thing dividing walkways of plywood were diamond fences.

I did a double take just to make sure I was actually at Skyline. So many questions ran through my mind – what will the campus look like when it’s done? How much does this cost? Will construction drag out the whole year? Without trees where will local guitar players play their music?

As the Skyline View’s cartoonist I was all ready with about two or three comics cracking fun at Skyline’s decision, with jokes about how the campus looks more like a constructing site then a school. But later I had decided to hold off and wait to see how things turned out. And I was not disappointed.

This may be the understatement of the year but I must say our campus looks great! I didn’t think our humble school could look better then it already did but I was wrong. It’s almost like Xzibit came and pimped out our school, only with more green and less bling.

Already anyone reading this knows that I approve of the school decision to do reconstruction, but I also feel this is a good idea in terms of our success in the future as an institute of higher learning.

The reconstruction will be most beneficial to us as a school, and I believe this to be true because I subscribe to the “Broken Window Theory”.

For those who do not know what that is it’s a theory thought up and published in the early 80s by James Q. Wilson and George L. Kelling, which appeared in the March edition of The Atlantic Monthly. One of their examples to the theory was to “consider a sidewalk. Some litter accumulates. Soon, more litter accumulates. Eventually, people even start leaving bags of trash…”

What this translates into criminal activities if something looks good and clean and decent people will be less motivated to commit wrongdoings. If, however an apartment has a broken window it’s like an open invitation to break into said apartment.

This theory was tested by leaving a car in a not-so-friendly neighborhood. After a week or so nothing had happened to it, but when the people conducting the test broke one of the windows – well, sure enough, after about a weak all the windows were broken into and the car was stripped from the inside out.

This was such a popular theory that in the early 90s, Republican mayor of New York Rudy Giuliani used this tactic by having the police commissioner crack down on pettier crimes that usually go on with out being punished; enforcing the law against subway fare evasion, stopping public drinkers, urinators, prostitutes, graffiti artists, and the “squeegee men” who had been wiping windshields of stopped cars and demanding payment. And from what records show crime went significantly down in the newer, cleaner-looking city.

Readers at this point should know where I’m going with this. To me this theory makes as much sense as the sun rising every morning and the moon coming out at night. So I believe this also applies to our school.

Our school is by no means a heaping cesspool of criminal activities, but we do properly present ourselves as a clean-cut campus. Why? Well, because then potential enrollees or potential staff members well be more inclined to want to be apart of the Skyline family, which can only be good for us.

And on a more personal level I know when the construction was going on I didn’t feel very much like being there because of how barren our campus was. With the new scenery? You couldn’t keep me away if you tried.

Students like me who feel the same way will want show up for class which means attendance will go up, and the new look might just be the visual pick-me-up some students need to get through the day.

Basically if we look good we feel good, and if we feel good we’ll do good, which is exactly the kind of mind set that each and every student needs to have when on school grounds.