Northwestern is a school of opportunity, right? It’s the kind of place that encourages students to put their best foot forward and try something new, isn’t it?

Somebody had better tell the Associated Student Government. They’re spitting opportunity right into the trash.

“Niteskool’s dead,” my friend told me. She had just discovered that the organization she’d been involved with for so long had lost its CD funding for next year. And she had to sit there and wonder why.

Niteskool is a student group devoted to producing a CD every year featuring student bands. It also gives one fortunate band the opportunity to have a song made into a music video, and it gives each of its bands the chance to perform at live concerts here at NU and in Chicago.

Niteskool also happens to be the oldest undergraduate student-run label in the country. Maybe you didn’t know that.

Maybe ASG didn’t know that when they decided to give the ax to this historic organization. They were probably just thinking of ways to get A&O Productions more money so we could be treated to more nonexistent events next year.

(I’m going to hear about that one.)

I know what else I’m going to hear, too. Some ASG so-and-so will write a letter to The Daily saying something like this: “Brendan Ansier blah blah doesn’t know what the blah blah he is talking about. We don’t have unlimited blah blah, and as it is, we gave Niteskool blah blah dollars to make their music video, so they aren’t dead. You should check the blah blah before you open your blah.”

Don’t write that letter, because you’d be wrong.

Yes, you gave a handful of dollars to Niteskool to make a music video again next year. Good thing, because these music videos have won Student Emmys and been on MTV. What you probably don’t understand, however, is that those music videos are selected from tracks off of the yearly Niteskool CD. No CD, no bands. No bands, no songs. No songs, no video. No CD and no video, no Niteskool.

Look, you go to a Niteskool meeting, and what do you see? The same thing you see at any student group meeting across this campus: passion. Students here have true desires to succeed – and overachieve. It’s what separates us from thousands of other colleges across the nation.

Ask anyone on this campus involved in a student group: How would they feel if one of their peers told them their group couldn’t exist anymore? How would Women’s Coalition feel if Take Back the Night were suddenly and inexplicably canceled? How would members of Northwestern Community Development Corps, Northwestern Community Ensemble or Alternative Spring Break react when told bluntly that their organization deserved no future funding? Heck, ASG members, how would you feel?

You cannot just kill off a student group. You do not have that right.

ASG, I advise you to think about your actions here and the precedent you are setting. If you kill this organization, a 20-year-old student group, what does that say about this university? What are you saying to every student who comes here for opportunities they can’t get anywhere else?

If you drop kick Niteskool, you’re not just saying it’s no good. You’re saying students aren’t allowed to have aspirations.

And if some 20-year-old punk is going to tell me that, then I regret ever coming here in the first place.