Well, tipoff for tonight’s UNC-Illinois game (if you are interested in it, unlike myself) is in 8 hours and the crazies are already out. We’re not talking about people celebrating the game, though they will be out soon enough. No, we’re talking protestors.
In a long line of what seems like daily protests at UNC-Chapel Hill, groups of students protested on South Building around lunch today. The protest deal with the arrest of Vel Dowdy, a Lenoir Hall dinning worker who was embezzling food by not charging students for food purchased.
Protestors, about 100 in all, were demanding this “saint” be allowed to return to work and that felony charges be dropped. Some had stickers that said “Free Vel.”
I caught the tail end of the protest. Though one student, who was in class at the time, said the protest did disrupt classes going on in surrounding buildings.
The situation was the focal point of a DTH editorial that states:
Whoever called for police involvement had the legal right to take such a measure. After all, if Dowdy did allow students to eat without charging them, as the police report states, she technically was going against company policy and the law.
But the response to the problem went too far for any legitimate purpose. Police investigated four instances in which Dowdy has been charged with allowing students to enter Top of Lenoir for free ? but this kind of offense didn?t justify police intervention. If these instances did take place, they would have been nothing more than a workplace problem. It seems that this issue easily could have been handled internally.
