Simpson College is finally embracing the 21st Century: soon, forum events will be more cost and time efficient and will be sporting some new technology that will promote sustainability.

The Simpson forum committee has been working on making it so that there are no more paper cards that have to be filled out at forum events. Students will just walk in, have their ID card scanned, and then have their card scanned again on their way out the door.

Thank you, Simpson, for (perhaps unknowingly) promoting a “green” campus and saving money by getting rid of the obnoxious forum cards, that, let’s face it, more times than not, get lost before they reach the hands of the adviser.

Not only will this save the environment one forum at a time, but it will also (hopefully) make things a lot more accurate and easier to track. Students won’t be able to forge forum cards for their friends anymore.

Needless to say, I don’t think they’ll get away with having an additional ID card scanned when they get to the forum event.

Here’s the downside, though. What happens if there’s a repeat of The Great Power Outage of 2010? Or what happens if a tent stake gets thrust into a power line running through the ground again?

Do we just hope and pray that there are some dusty forum cards sitting alone in a dark corner, just waiting to be used? Or if the power outage is after said forum event, and all names are lost, how will students get credit for being at the event? Word of mouth? A picture on a Blackberry? The honor system?

Power outages aside, we believe that this is a great idea. It’s going to benefit numerous student groups who aren’t going to have to worry about having an excess of forum cards printed off if they plan a forum event.

It’s going to save the school who knows how much money in printing costs, and ultimately, Simpson College is well on its way to saving the world one ID scan at a time.