There are a lot of things on this campus that make me bitter. I could only get into one class in my major and one in my minor this semester. The Hatch is rarely open at reasonable times for the average student. There are potholes everywhere, which destroy our cars and delay the PVTA buses. Orchard Hill is slowly being taken over by Commonwealth College students and squeezing out non-honors students. The housing freeze is over and there are still students living in lounges. Our library is losing reference materials and periodicals and we have the largest collection in the area. It’s been freezing but there hasn’t been any heat in my dorm, and later this winter I’ll be baked like a turkey because there will be too much of it. In many courses you will never see the professor, but rather be taught solely by teaching assistants. I’m paying $60 to park in dirt at the admissions building about two blocks from my dorm. It’s also tough to get an escort service that late at night. Oh yeah, and the dirt lot doesn’t get plowed in the winter so I’ll have to dig my way out, or according to some students, I’ll have to pay to get my car towed out of my spot because of the mud. I’m sure you can relate to many of these gripes and can add many more.

One thing that really concerns me is the huge spending gap between the athletics department and academics. I like sports, but if supporting the athletic department is going to create a situation where I can’t graduate on time, then my priorities shift. Sure, it brings national prestige to the school if the athletic program is good, but what does it do for the student body? I’ll openly admit that I almost chose UConn over UMass (go ahead boo me, hate my guts if it will make you feel better) but quite obviously I saw the better choice and came here. One of the biggest turn offs I found at UConn was the amount of money they spent on athletics. When I was looking at the school, I saw this huge map in their admissions office, with spaces marked as “new.” I asked the tour guide what was being built assuming it was a new library or dormitory, maybe classrooms. They were new intramural athletic facilities, which would cost a few million. The new fields were going to be great because the other four intramural facilities they already had were becoming old, and run down. Apparently, the majority of the student body at UConn participates in athletics, because if they can’t actually play for the school, it will just become an extra-curricular activity. A few million for new intramural facilities? That factor alone also determined the student body, which would be mostly athletes, and I didn’t want to be in that environment. There simply wouldn’t be enough diversity of opinion, and if you were non-athletic, what would you do there for fun?

But athletics is only one aspect money is being mishandled at UMass. The list I made at the beginning of this column must strike a few nerves or inspire other problems you have. And what’s being done? Nothing. Or at least not enough for administration to look over the rims of its bifocals and break out the school rioting code. Nothing is being done because we’re not asking for things to be done. Most of us sit back and think that things cannot change. We’re not directing our anger towards productivity, and then we label the people that want change. We label the people that go to student protests as the angry graduate students, radicals, hippies and students looking for reasons to protest. If you don’t know one, I dare you to approach and talk to a “hippie.” You’ll probably have more in common with you than they think. “Hippies” are also students, who suffer from the same problems with this campus that everyone else does. “Hippies” also have trouble getting parking permits, and into the same class you need to graduate. And some of those angry graduate students are great teachers when we don’t have professors, but they’re not getting paid enough to be teachers and students at the same time. Basically, we’re all getting screwed by the system together and the few people that are trying to organize and fight the system every day are being discriminated against by the rest of the campus. If you’re not going to do anything to try to make your life better, then don’t criticize the leaders that are trying to fight for you. I mean, I’ve listed enough things that if we all pooled our anger together we could take over Whitmore. Students have taken over Goodell, which was administration before.

On occasion I’ve heard students complain that there is nothing to fight for anymore. We cannot organize ourselves to be a Civil Rights movement or to match the anti-war protests of the 1970s. I say that they are completely wrong. We are surrounded by injustices every day, large and small that deserve attention. They might not be huge moral crusades, but whatever your gripe is, it’s obviously significant enough for you to complain to your friends over dinner. If it’s something that inconveniences you daily or bothers you more than once a week, isn’t it somewhat important in your life? If we keep letting administration rob us of our education and basic services that other college students have, there will be nothing left. And once something is taken away it’s even tougher to get back, which is a lesson we can take from the Civil Rights Movement. After reconstruction from the Civil War, things improved for blacks, but only for a short period of time. Things became too comfortable for one group of people, and worse for another group. In the following years, the government did not do a good job enforcing laws or fixing the problems in the past, until things got so bad that there needed to be a large revolution. The Civil Rights Movement was a long and bloody battle, and happened at the absolute breaking point for blacks.

Is that how things are going to get, to our sanity’s end? Are we going to return as alumni to see our campus completely ruined? If we don’t struggle to make things better now, we will never get things accomplished and students of the future will have a tough time getting back the things we let slip away. As students we are not demanding enough from this administration and are too content with sitting back pessimistically, thinking that we can’t question the system or make a change. Change only takes one person. Take a step to do something: talk to your SGA senator, organize an interest group, join a registered student organization. Don’t let your problems linger and become overly comfortable. A comfortable situation can only lead to a rude awakening.