The clock is ticking. You can almost hear it — the first rumbles of spring quarter after a long, cold winter — if one knows what to look and listen for.

Like other schools, the OSU campus pulse responds to the signals of the natural clock as diligently as a flock of southbound Canada geese. As the snow melts and the warmer weather signals an end to the hibernation — as will happen in several weeks — this campus may erupt into a frenzy that has not been seen for years.

It is a frenzy that could set up the off-campus area for a pending doom that couldn’t come at a worse time or to a more unprepared environment. A doom that may eclipse even the long, furious riot season of 2000-2001.

If I sound paranoid, it is for a reason.

Many reasons, in fact.

The spring quarter after an especially bitter winter can be an intense time and place, especially when there are more students than ever in a neighborhood with fewer bars and hangouts.

Nothing to quell that intensity has been enacted, let alone even discovered or hinted at.

The university has found no creative solution to avoid the neighborhood destruction of the last three years, even after all the national notoriety of last quarter’s off-campus riots.

Gone too is much of the buffer of High Street commerce and entertainment that stood to dampen some of the blitz in the past. What is left shrinks almost daily as bars close down, leaving nothing to take their place. The Gateway Project — along with other Campus Partners initiatives — has been so mismanaged and delayed that the friendly billboards over the empty lots around East 10th Avenue seem more like a cruel joke than an indication of what’s to come.

The university also tenatively plans for both the Heritage Festival and the spring football game to be scheduled the same weekend as OSU’s notorious Chittfest, posing a complex series of problems — a lack of parking, an inaccessible campus route and gross overpopulation — that may cause the off-campus area to self-destruct.

All in all, besides the various token task forces and forums on riotous behavior — which will most likely find data that borders the obvious and the inconsequential — the only substantial policy change in the wake of the off-campus destruction was the alteration of the Student Code of Conduct several years back.

This change expanded the university’s jurisdiction to include “any activity that causes substantial destruction of property belonging to the university or members of the university community or causes serious harm to the health or safety of members of the university community.”

But what is sorely lacking from university policy — as evident from everything stated above — is the follow-through on the other half of its implicit responsibility. Implied in the expansion of OSU jurisdiction is the fact that the university needs to control the off-campus area for its own well-being. If so, they too have a duty to partake in its upkeep. Since the off-campus situation affects the school so profoundly, then it stands to reason OSU should play an integral part in the maintenance and its development of the off-campus area.

Unfortunately, this has not been the case, as the OSU-funded Campus Partners falls further behind and school officials seem more anxious to sit around finding student culprits on a Web site than make any efforts for revamping the off campus area.

Sadly, a month before spring quarter — and years after a huge chunk of campus was bought out and destroyed — may be too late for most solutions, and the likely but unfortunate path seems to be the constant turmoil and the imposition of a small police state around East 10th Avenue that benefited no one (police, student or professor) back in 2001.

The irreconcilable situation that is pending — brought about by both internal university personnel and peripheral university-supported organizations — implicates the university. The off-campus atmostphere is so unnecessarily volatile that if things start to self-destruct this time, there will be no way for the university to escape a lion’s share of the blame, no matter how many fingers they want to point to student partiers.

And without a minor miracle — and a rapid wake-up call for OSU policymakers — the point of no return will be passed sometime during finals week, and the storm, as they say, will be upon us.

John Ross is senior in English and comparative studies. He can be reached for comment at [email protected].