Are you a CC member interested in parking? Former Record editor-in-chief Mike Needham ‘04 has news for you.

My sister brought a copy of the Williams Record home which I was perusing for old times’ sake. There is a cartoon in the 1/16 issue indicating that no students are allowed in the parking garage. This was continually an issue during our tenure as editors of the Record, where the College would forbid students from parking in the lot — even though dozens of spots could be given to students — out of a sheer unwillingness to take the 15 minutes necessary to crunch numbers.

The following articles should bring you up to speed: Record discovers College can give parking spots to students. Editorial making this point more explicitly (a damn good one, at that). College reverses policy based on Record analysis.

My favorite part of being Record editor was the opportunity to really dig into issues like this, the placement of the turf field, whether the snack bar was unnecessarily charging students tax, etc. where we could have a real role — either in large ways or small — in changing Williams policy which was wrong (almost always because of lack of attention or easily giving in to a specific interest at the expense of the whole… rarely out of malice).

My bet is that if CC or the Record really looked into the parking garage right now, they would find spots that students could park in. And that would mean that 49 students currently parked at THompson lot would get to keep their car right outside their house in Greylock, which means 49 students in Lower Poker get to move up to Thompson, and 49 students at Taconic move to Lower Poker, and 49 students without parking for a car get to bring one on campus. And, voila, just a few hours of questioning things that don’t make sense means 10% of the college is marginally happier. If you want to get in to the weeds on this story, Jeff Nelson and Bart Claremen did all the reporting.

Perhaps the new leadership at CC and the Record should look into this.