Last week, when the demolition work began on the bungalows, few at Pierce seemed to bat an eye.
But, the front page photo that this newspaper ran showing asbestos warning signs and quoting a crew supervisor as saying that the asbestos was going to the dump, reportedly caused an uproar among College officials.
Why?
The amount of asbestos in the bungalows is at or below the 1 percent, which Cal/OSHA deems a personal safety issue, rather than a public safety concern.
There is nothing wrong with what the college, or the Swinerton Construction and Management Company, is doing.
Somehow, though, the pervasive attitude on this campus is that it is better to keep students in the dark about matters of their own security and safety.
Hiding things has never been a way to secure public confidence and maybe it’s time our administrators realize that.
In February, there was a bomb scare on campus involving dozens of police and sheriff’s officers, in addition to an LAPD bomb squad.
It was a situation that required the closure of the campus’ main parking lot and a major stretch of public roadway that thousands of San Fernando Valley residents use on a daily basis.
Yet at the time, no orderly method for informing students of the closure was put into place and many wandered around the mall or areas around the Child Development Center, wondering what was happening and why they could not go to their cars and leave.
Last month, in a weather-induced power failure, the administration again chose to ignore the inevitable and continue classes in core buildings through the use of back-up generators, which while admirable in its effort to continue education, ignored the public safety concerns of informing students of outages in other areas of town.
In areas without power, there was no communication of when that power might be restored, or even that anyone was working on the problem.
No public announcement was made at the time of either event, so why would we expect one about the dangers of the campus construction?
This spin-controlled public relations policy is difficult to detach from last month’s horrific Virginia Tech massacre.
While obviously there is a giant leap from power outages and asbestos contamination to mass murdering students, the very policy that our higher-ups seem to be embracing –that our student body is not intelligent or capable enough to make decisions in a crisis –is the very policy that led officials in Virginia to keep from their student population that a gunman had killed two students on campus.
What we do seek, however, is to change the paternal sensibilities that Pierce seems to have.
The college setting is imperative to educated thought and decision-making.
Embrace it.