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.
