Roughly 11 years ago, Millikin University sold the spacious No. 4 Millikin Place, built by a protégé of Frank Lloyd Wright and complete with over 100 stained glass windows, due to matters of financial concern. Yet, despite the university’s constant changes and spending, the house is officially back under Millikin ownership, for a mere $449,000.

The purchase, completed in December, has already come under a lot of fire. Some argue that the house, intended to become home to President Patrick E. White and his wife, is fully deserved due to the contributions they have made to this campus. Others are against the purchase entirely, arguing that it was poor timing amongst the financial chaos that campus is already enduring. I, on the other hand, believe that there is more to this situation than we have been made privy to.

First of all, I do not believe that the money spent was necessarily well-timed. However, our president, being the frugal man that he is, would not have made any decisions that could have harmed the university. Like the Transform MU and Building a Better Millikin campaigns, this purchase could have been achieved through the donations of others. However, it does bother me that we are unaware of where this funding came from.

Furthermore, most houses have an option to lease. Regardless of the method of payment, a monthly plan makes more sense to me, with so many changes occurring on campus, than to spend such a massive amount of potentially university funded money.

However, this isn’t to say that the purchase won’t be beneficial to the campus community. The community has been urging the repurchase of the house for years now, and rejoices at its university ownership again. The president and his wife, despite living alone in such a large home, plan on hosting gatherings for faculty and students both past and present. It will become a home for the university in whole, not just the president.

Overall, I am more or less ambivalent over the purchase. There are too many unknown facts for me to even consider forming a well-established point of view or trying to argue it. I think the best thing that we, as students, can do is to accept that we don’t have all the facts, and understand that our president only has our best interests at heart.