Students at Tulane University in New Orleans, Louisiana, have some ideas for how their school can combat the coronavirus pandemic. Those ideas, however, include wish list items that have nothing to do with the pandemic.
The Washington Free Beacon reported that activists at Tulane sent a letter to administrators with numerous left-wing demands they say will make the campus safer. The students initially begin their list of demands with ideas relating to virtual learning, requesting such an option for all students “in every available class at any point in the semester, not just for those who are quarantining, without the threat of repercussions or need to provide a reason.” They also want to allow professors to choose whether to use in-person, virtual, or a hybrid learning model – though the students say professors shouldn’t be able to require students attend in person. The students also demanded pass/fail grading options of “ALL classes without a credit limit” and reducing dorm occupancy to maintain social distancing, while guaranteeing housing for “students who are food and/or housing insecure.”
After a dozen demands at least tangentially related to the pandemic, the students veer off into the left-wing territory, demanding a $15 minimum wage while also demanding the school spend money on more expensive and less useful plastic alternatives like paper and bamboo for single-use items at the cafeteria.
The students’ demands became even more wacky once they started asking the school to divest from fossil fuels.
“The response to hurricanes- evacuation and sheltering in large groups- is inherently incompatible with the response to COVID-19- staying at home and social distancing,” the students wrote, noting that evacuating a hurricane in some places was difficult due to social distancing requirements. “The fossil fuel industry is directly to blame for the climate change that makes hurricane season worse every year, and it is more urgent than ever for Tulane to divest and stop supporting these companies with its endowment dollars.”
As the Free Beacon noted, this list of demands also includes four other previously released demands of various student groups, including the Black Student Union and a group demanding Tulane abolish its police department.
Tulane senior Rachel Altman told the Free Beacon that the activists hurt their credibility by including radical left-wing demands with coronavirus ideas and by holding a campus protest that violated the school’s coronavirus restrictions.
“These ideas don’t belong in a plan that was meant to improve upon the school’s fall COVID response,” Altman told the outlet. “I’d like to see a more efficient COVID-19 response too, but it seems to escape these organizers that they’d have more success in convincing Tulane to sign onto this platform if it stayed focused on COVID safety instead of looping in contentious line items.”
She added that the protesters spread “unfounded and dishonest conspiracy theories” about Tulane’s response to the pandemic on social media as well.
The school told the outlet that it agrees with the activists’ demands “to provide a safe, equitable, and productive learning environment for all members of our academic community,” but did not say anything about whether it would adopt their requests.