Three weeks after submitting a request to the Northwestern administration asking to see a record of its landscaping-related expenses, Dylan Ziegler, Medill ’19, has been officially reported missing. His repeated absences from his research methods class eventually aroused the suspicions of Professor Morris Carlisle, who realized that Ziegler hadn’t dropped the class and hadn’t been seen around Plex for almost a month.

At the request of a senior editor with North by Northwestern who obviously knew better than to investigate it herself, Ziegler had gone to the poorly lit and out-of-the-way University Archives near the music collections in Deering Library to find answers. Evidently, there was unforeseen danger in his quest to find out how much of students’ tuitions the administration had spent on re-sodding Fisk Hall’s grass, removing the fruit trees on Sheridan, pruning the Shakespeare Garden, and keeping Morty’s private fountain filled with champagne.

According to a cryptic text sent on the night he disappeared, Ziegler wrote, “There’s something huge in those files. Maybe it’s just that the landscaping contractors skim some off the top, but maybe there’s something they don’t want us to know.” While there was a read receipt on his editor’s reply, there was no further communication from the sophomore journalism major.

The archivist on staff, who was the last one to see Ziegler before he disappeared, said she referred him to the Office of Budget and Planning, where he was kept on hold for close to thirty minutes before being asked to meet at a less conspicuous location. The trail at this point goes cold, as an anonymous source inside the OBP said the Medill sophomore had “crossed a line” in asking for more detail than the four pages of PowerPoint pie chart that are publicly available.

In the course of investigating the disappearance, The Flipside has received a cease and desist letter from the university administration, as well as death threats made from letters cut out of magazines and pasted together.