The College Fix

A million bucks is only the beginning

The University of California, Santa Barbara’s Black Student Union delivered a real barn-burner of a list of demands to the school’s administration last week: The students ordered their school to create eight new full-time staff positions to support black students on campus, a move that would result in over $900,000 in new salaries. The group also demanded “a standalone building for Black students,” because why not. Unsurprisingly, the school’s student government threw its support behind the list of demands, urging the university to “take accountability for actions of anti-Blackness system-wide.”

Presenting a university administration with a list of demands is nothing new; it’s been going on for decades, hitting its stride in the countercultural explosion of the 1960s. It does seem to be getting worse; where before aggrieved students may have demanded a mere sensitivity training class and perhaps a new couch for the student union, today it is considered normal for activists to request, as is the case here, what amounts to an entirely new department complete with an astonishingly large price tag. A million bucks—actually much more than that, when you consider the costs of constructing a “standalone building”—could buy a lot of things; it could give dozens of needy students a free ride to the university, for instance. But the school apparently has a pervasive “anti-Blackness” problem, so…

It is all rather silly and we all tend to have a laugh about it. Unfortunately, universities tend to take these types of things all-too-seriously, caving in to outrageous student demands for fear of not seeming woke enough. And so vast quantities of cash get poured into a campus apparatus for no reason other than to appease a bunch of angry, misinformed student protesters. What could possibly go wrong?

MORE: Black Student Union demands $900k in new salaries, exclusive building

IMAGE: Roman Samborksky / Shutterstock.com

Like The College Fix on Facebook / Follow us on Twitter