April Fool’s for IU on Strike

Although I do not agree with every single demand of the strike, I have been supportive of the strike since its first proposal meetings for a variety of reasons.

When I heard that the Board of Trustees was offering to meet with the strikers, I was overjoyed. 

Since there is still no public comment allowed at the Board of Trustees meetings, I thought that this would be a fantastic opportunity to comment on the decisions that affect all of us here at IU, and whether you are student, faculty, staff or community member, the university plays a large part in your life while in Bloomington.

Was this finally an opportunity to voice our concerns and complaints with the way our University is run? 

I began to think of all the things that I would like to say about the ever-rising tuition, the failure of the trustees to enact policy that would meet their promise of doubling African-American enrolment, the wage freeze for staff while administration gets bonuses and a host of other topics that students and staff have brought up during the course of the year.

But alas.

The email inviting us to meet with them was a fake.

An early April Fool’s joke maybe, but either way, it shows how little the trustees actually care about us (the ones paying the tuition fees that keep the University running).

The fact that they haven’t and probably won’t offer to meet shows that they are not even willing to hear the voices of the 40,000+ people who are directly affected by their decisions. In a 2012 interview IU President Michael McRobbie said of student loans and debt, “these are issues that keep me and other advocates for public higher education awake at night.” 

Let’s help McRobbie finally get a good night’s sleep and make sure that this strike shakes the University system to its very core and creates something new and progressive that accounts for the needs of all of us involved in this great quest for higher education.

­— Justinian Dispenza