Throw the plans for Binghamton University’s law school in the tire fire.
The “Premier Public University in the Northeast” isn’t near ready to effectively shape legal minds, not when its own lawyers and administrators are just weeks away from letting the students’ bus service, Off Campus College Transport, shut down because of a tax-filing error that they’ve now had three years to solve.
Forget that the University actually had 24 years to discover the error, which was made when OCCT began as a fledgling student service (see Page 1): it’s inconceivable that a school that thinks it’s on the way to the elite would rely on students alone to manage their transportation issues without the benefit of their resources.
The University should long ago have recognized its responsibility to the students. If this were impossible, it should have established its own service.
The BU community cannot do without the blue buses. We need them to get from Hillside to the East Gym, to the malls, to the University Downtown Center — the construction of which was justified by the promise of OCCT buses to shuttle students to Washington Street and back to Vestal.
It’s already impossible to park on campus (or at the UDC), and Binghamton’s standing as an environment-friendly school would be meaningless if the University forces every student privileged enough to have a car to use it constantly.
It’s incompetence. Whatever attempts the University made to sweep OCCT’s tax problem under the rug with temporary fixes were misguided and naive. Now lawyers say the problem can be fixed in one to six weeks, diligence that should have been paid years ago. The past is the past, but going forward, this is absolute: the buses cannot stop running.
If the University has $3 million to plan a law school, and according to the Press & Sun-Bulletin, $311,350 to pay President Lois B. DeFleur last year — it has the money to keep the wheels turning.