What is this place called NC State?

Note: If the reference is lost on you, this post refers to the current NC State ad campaign.

It’s the Autobahn of overreaction.
The superhighway to spinelessness.
The boulevard to bureaucracy.
The pathway to petty tyranny.
A monument to mollycoddling.
A cow pasture to kowtowing.
An open window for whining weenies.
Here we pervert higher learning into H-I-R-E Mrs. Easley …

And here’s the latest example, from Technician (“Bathroom vandalism in Becton affects entire Quad; All who entered building when incident occurred to be charged”). Some excerpts:

All students who live in Becton Residence Hall are being charged for repairs following an incident of vandalism to a men’s restroom on Feb. 27. ..

At about 9:30 a.m. on Feb. 27 a resident adviser in Becton contacted Jordan Luzader, community director of the Quad, and showed him vandalism which a Quad-wide email revealed consisted of a Confederate flag and the words “the south will rise again” carved into the door and wall of a stall in a second floor bathroom.

Director of East Campus Housing Aris Mosier said Luzader and the RA followed protocol by calling campus police to determine whether the message carved was threatening.

“The police decided it was just vandalism,” Mosier said.

Facilities staff attempted to repair the stall the next day with sanders and a heat gun but were not satisfied with the result, he said, and a work order was placed to replace both walls and the door. The cost of replacement is about $1,100, and will result in a charge of $5.10 added to each student’s account, Mosier said.

The story gets better. The campus leadership may be out of their collected gourds, but the students at least aren’t:

“Apparently it’s scratched into a door, which to me means the fix is you putty over that and then maybe if you want you get like a $2 can of paint and cover it up so it looks like the rest of the door,” Tim Dannenhoffer, a sophomore in applied mathematics and aerospace engineering and Becton resident, said. “That fix is like five dollars and 15 minutes and that’s pretty much how [it] should really be fixed. But apparently that’s not the important thing.” …

On March 11 an unidentified student managed to reface the stall through his own means, leaving a note behind stating, according to Rodriguez, “It’s an insult to call us an engineering school if we can’t come up with a simple and easy solution to a problem like this.”

There can’t be a sensible ending to it, of course. This is NC State, the turnpike of turnipheaded bureaucracy or whatever:

Mosier said that even though he was glad a student took the initiative to fix this problem himself and that he’d heard it looked good, the work order had already been sent and couldn’t be cancelled because “the wheels [were] already in motion.”