[This letter was published by the UCSD Guardian available here: http://www.ucsdguardian.org/opinion/item/25318-editorials-should-support-student-orgs]
Dear Editors,
Our primary goal is to defend public education by engaging and empowering students. We are not the out-of-touch idealists featured in your article and editorial on January 26th.
The renovation of CLICS was not announced in response to the reclamation last quarter. It was announced in an A.S. Council press release on September 30th, 2011. Last year A.S. killed an $8 student fee to save CLICS, but now it wants to pass a $165 fee for D-1 sports.
Although students have taken responsibility for running CLICS, we have not set its hours, we did not know or plan for it to be open, and University Centers closes the building every night. The administration did not “invite student input” about re-opening CLICS. They re-opened CLICS without communication or negotiation, and only afterwards did they email students.
For a student-run news paper, your editorial board is surprisingly cynical about student-run organizations. The $370,000 you said it would take to run old CLICS is irrelevant to whether students can run a 100 seat study space in the new ‘Galbraith Hall’ (named for Chancellor John S. Galbraith and his lifelong commitment to libraries which have lost 16% of their budget at UCSD). Running CLICS costs $450,000 annually, but renovation will cost $6,700,000, enough to run CLICS almost fifteen years. Read the rest of this entry »