OPPORTUNITY COSTS. Reason's Steve Chapman urges restraint on replacing Cole Hall.

There are lessons there for any institution that goes through a similar tragedy: Be strong. Hold to your own purposes. Understand that this will pass. Don't let a psychopath govern you from the grave.

But none of these was offered by the governor of Illinois or the administration of Northern Illinois University in the aftermath of the Valentine's Day slaughter in a lecture hall on the DeKalb campus. In what must come as a shock not only to the people of the state but the rest of the country, they propose to bulldoze the building and replace it with a new one, at a cost of $40 million.

If the facility were an ancient firetrap, this might be the right moment to do the inevitable. But Cole Hall is a perfectly functional building that, having been built in 1968, is younger than your average tenured professor.

Cole is not "perfectly functional" where handicapped access and the latest instructional bells and whistles are concerned, although the university's renovation plan has several other projects, most notably a renovation of the adjacent and slightly older Stevens Building, ahead of a replacement for Cole. The discussion of what to do with the building, which is also home to the anime society, offers an instructive manifestation of the broken window fallacy, and its more plausible-sounding but more pernicious relative, the bombed factory fallacy. (That's the one that attributes Japanese industrial success relative to the United States to its new factories.) It's clear from the discussion about what to do with Cole Hall that removing it could involve the sacrifice of an opportunity to build something else. That would be equally true if it had been demolished by a tornado or damaged by a bombing, both events that have occurred on midwestern campuses. To take it down and replace it cannot be viewed as economic stimulus for DeKalb. The anime society, by the way, has left a memorial sign at the rear entrance that expresses a wish to keep their screening room.