Splicetoday

On Campus
Feb 20, 2009, 05:47AM

Kids these days

We used to protest every day, uphill both ways, eating nickel candy bars from the soda jerk. You're just locking yourselves in nice cafeterias at expensive universities.

Student protests have become so lame. On Wednesday a group of NYU students barricaded themselves in a cafeteria, refusing to leave or to meet with university officials until their demands are met. Their demands?

The students want NYU to release information on its budget and endowment, including staff salaries and financial aid. The students also want the university to release its investment strategy and the names of the people and firms involved in it.

Gawker isn't very amused:

And while student activism in decades past was at least defensible as going after one pillar of establishment power, academia in 2009 is just a finishing school for rich kids and a playground for people who'd really like to spend their professional careers wrestling with the least important but most dramatic office politics in the world, so they can someday net that $300k salary and the reduced mortgage, only to get shit on by Politco and the rest of the world for making a living with their book-learnin' elitism.

I agree with Gawker. Go home, kids, until you can find something more worthwhile to protest about. Surely the world isn't so perfect that the only thing left worth protesting is inaccessible financial information from an institution you chose to attend.

Discussion
  • Very good item. Gawker blows, but not as badly as the students involved in this dumb "protest." Demanding that NYU donate money and materials to a Palestinian university and giving scholarships to Palestinian students? I wonder how many of the protesters could even find Gaza or Tel Aviv or Tehran on a map. I bet less than 30%.

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  • I'm not sure I can get behind your (or TableMountain's) quick and poorly-argued dismissal of the situation. I agree, student protests aren't what they used to be (more's the pity -- let's burn some shit down, people). Now, I didn't go to NYU, but I think a situation common to most colleges/universities is the completely fucked up way that the bureaucracy decides to delegate money -- especially after years and years of tuition, housing, etc costs on the rise. Not to mention, Gawker needs to learn some history and pull its fucking head out of its ass. No one would who knows anything about the history and growth of higher education in the U.S. (and Europe) would say that colleges/universities now compared to colleges/universities 50 or 75 or 100+ years ago is merely "a finishing school for rich kids." Understanding the dumbass priorities of the Administration is the first step to working towards a better education system.

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  • *Apologies for various typos and grammatical mistakes. I only have a BA.

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  • Like I said Gawker blows, and I agree with your assessment of their dumbo talk about "finishing schools." Likewise, I'm no water boy for the administrations of colleges, who put a higher emphasis on fund-raising (good luck, these days) rather than mere undergraduates. On the other hand, the money is also ill-spent on lousy professors. But I don't think you make the case for the protesters at NYU. Seemed to me like a good reason to skip classes.

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  • I don't remember ever needing a reason to skip classes.

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