I woke one morning to the sounds of a 4-ton vacuum cleaner honking its horn at me. I wasn’t in bed, of course, but dragging my feet to an 8 a.m. accountancy lecture.

The giant contraption rattled as it labored across the street from one patch of University lawn to another, sucking in the fallen fall foliage. I stopped abruptly as it crossed my path, staring blankly at its outlandish design: a pod-shaped truck head – wielding oblong suction cups underneath its body – was latched crudely to a small semi-trailer fit for storing leaves. A yellow extension tube hung limply between truck and trailer, brewing a windstorm into the leaf-hold as it funneled crisped leaves from the suction cups.

I waved happily to the driver of the barely-mobile vacuum but he stared gruffly back probably wondering why a bed-headed boy was so happy to see him. I could have sworn a bumper sticker reading Leaf-Eater 2000 was plastered to the Seuss-inspired machine as it lumbered past.

In class, I stared idly outside the window watching the vacuum weave back and forth on the leaf-strewn grass. I pondered the existence of the vacuum and its implications on the University’s lawn care.

And I so I wondered: Is it necessary to spend so much time and labor collecting leaves off the ground?

The trees which line the Quad with greenery during the spring and summer shed in autumn so that campus is showered in falling leaves. Any attempt to tidy up campus’s lawns is temporary at best, and I can’t imagine that the University’s behemothic leaf vacuums come cheap. The ridiculousness of this leaf collecting task is matched only by the comic-book construction of the Leaf-Eater 2000.

It’s interesting that of all the countless photos of colleges and universities in autumn time, so few show lawns sprinkled with fallen leaves. Instead, what we see in college brochures and picture-perfect Web sites are scenes of quads with red-brown-and-yellowed trees but pristine green lawns.

So where do all the leaves go? What happens after the leaf vacuums take them?

I’m imagining our very own Chancellor Herman jumping into an obscenely large pile of fall leaves, laughing maniacally as he rolls from side to side over his wealth of crunching foliage.

Is this attention to detail necessary? The beauty of our campus captured on the cover of a catalogue should be a reflection of a natural reality, not the obsessive-compulsively manicured reality of the Leaf-Eater 2000. The beauty of autumn is a piece of the experience at Illinois; the falling leaves are a call-to-order for students: Upturn your jacket collars against the fall breeze; it’s time to cram after so many weeks of floundered midterms! The round up and collection of fallen leaves on campus denies prospective students a reality of our campus: Leaves fall in college, too.

The reality of leaf-fall is trivially small but says profound things about our university. In collecting it, we succumb to the mob mentality that fallen leaves detract from the pristine, erudite environment of a college campus. Declared contraband, these leaves are hauled out of campus and deposited in god-knows-where, while the University and its students can move about pretending that its lawns go unfettered and remain excellently green until first snowfall. But instead of hiding this not-so-shameful fact on campus, our catalogues should brim with pride at scenes with students jumping into mountainous piles of leaves.

When I ambled out of class, the leaf vacuum had disappeared. And with it, a month’s worth of fallen leaves. I wondered once more where the leaves might be taken, jotting a note to myself to find out where Chancellor Herman lives.

Henry is a sophomore in Business. He’s all for leaves.