My problems with Occupy

On April 12, student advocates decided to protest inside the IU Board of Trustees meeting. This was a unilaterally dumb idea.

It’d been a bad week, both for the Occupy IU movement, which some of those protestors are associated with, and my general faith in humanity.

For starters, you got the wrong people. The Board of Trustees approves the campus budget; it doesn’t create it. While you’re busy not doing basic research, my trusty Internet machine revealed that all 59 pages of the most recent IU Financial Report are available for public review.

Therefore, nothing is preventing concerned students from submitting an alternative, reasonable budget proposal, if they think they have anything constructive to say.

Also, we need to acknowledge the world’s most unflappable administrators, who didn’t let an impromptu rally in the middle of the room derail their scheduled meeting.

Secondly, IU is not trying to bankrupt you. Not intentionally, anyway.

If you’ll look, tuition costs are rising across the nation. This is due to a number of factors, such as inflation, a decrease in state subsidies and rising demand for college education.

The one thing these causes all have in common is that they have literally nothing to do with the Board of Trustees. These tuition hikes aren’t going directly into the Board of Trustees’ pockets or anyone else’s. Except McRobbie’s.

All right, fine. Here’s the Cliff’s Notes version: McRobbie’s salary is strictly average for presidents of Big Ten schools.

McRobbie has done an irreproachable job of managing IU.  In business, you incentivize your best workers to ensure that they continue to work for you. There are roughly 42,000 students on the Bloomington campus alone.

McRobbie’s salary raise costs about a dollar per student. Any questions?

Occupy, you are an embarrassment and a perversion of the very idea of political protest. You’ve had the attention of campus, and you’ve done nothing with it but shout the meaningless slogans you’ve traded for constructive input.

Where were your fearless advocates of students’ rights and heralds of change when IUSA ran unopposed for student government?

Certainly, that would have given you an even greater platform to offer your suggestions and rally student support for whatever initiatives you might propose, even if the student government cannot directly change policy.

Or maybe meaningless, ignorable protests and police evictions are too elevated a form of public discourse for me to understand.

Either way, I believe I speak for all the sane, rational students when I say, “Leave us out of it.” The Occupy protest is nothing but pure, rampaging, unthinking id, only interested in its immediate, personal discontents.

As students, we already face the stereotypes of being self righteous, short sighted, irresponsible and ignorant. If you want to help us, Occupy, sit down, shut up and let the grown-ups talk.

­— stefsoko@indiana.edu