A letter to President Maric, BoT, USG et al.  

In the words of D’Angelo: How does it feel?  

Wednesday marked perhaps your greatest misfiring yet. What happened in Hartford — and throughout the past week or so — has been a mockery of our institution. But that doesn’t reflect poorly on the student body (most of them, at least). The students, if anything, were the only sensible ones throughout this entire fiasco (again, most of them). You tried to convince 20,000 educated young adults that they would be at the receiving end of a forged “budget cut;” that due to the relinquishing of COVID-19 ARPA funding by the state, students would have to face the brunt of some $3,000 increase in tuition. And on top of this, you expected students to blame the state for these increases. It’s embarrassing, really.  

$17 million for your ice rink, supported by up to $20 million in donations alone from your pocket; $215 million of debt on yet another residence and dining hall; some $18 million to our bloated, unnecessarily-militarized, fear-mongering police force; a $53 million hole in your athletic wallet; the list goes on.  

The humiliation of watching an institution — our institution — implode onto itself politically and financially is overwhelming. Lottery winners spend money better than you do. Above all this, however, persists a new level of transparency between you and your constituents. It is here, however, where I transition the meaning of you — Radenka Maric and the BoT — to you — USG as an organization.  

The paradox of a university-affiliated and funded advocacy group is a mockery of justice, and we all know what happened to the last one — you actually received $125,000 in funding following Praxis’ shutdown. You spent $37,000 on a temper tantrum grounded in misinformation — an amount approved on Jan. 21, two weeks before your #SaveUConn social media frenzy; you went along with the empty threats of tuition hikes, blaming the state instead of the institution which allots you $1.6 million in student fees. Plastering posters across campus, fruitlessly spray-painting academic buildings — likely with administrative consent to do so — you attempted to establish a guise that somehow USG is the voice of the student body. You failed, miserably.  

 And now, as elections approach, students have grown tired of being told that you stand for anything other than the values shared by the morally corrupt board of trustees. If we as a student body were to maintain the belief that we are being accurately represented, let alone represented at all, by the members of your organization following the actions of Wednesday and prior, we’d be mistaken.  

As you and the members of your governing board shared your concerns regarding these alleged budget cuts on Wednesday via oral speech and social media, you remained willfully ignorant of the truth. To clarify: UConn is not facing budget cuts. UConn is receiving MORE state funding than last year and any year before that — some $23 million more, excluding the additional $110.4 million in proposed ARPA allocations. You knew this, well before Wednesday, and yet you continued to pander to the student body while weaponizing the unfounded threat of tuition increases. 

Your sycophantic attempt to provoke thousands of undergraduate students to protest on behalf of a financially brainless institution is over. USG was, is and will continue to be nothing more than a brainwashed, overachieving extension of the avaricious board of trustees, helmed by Dan Toscano, Radenka Maric and, shocker, Ned Lamont. Your pathetic need for power has led you down a dark and narrow road. And, in some crazy way, that’s exactly what you’ve set out to achieve.  

Politics, especially U.S. politics, is plagued by spineless, lying individuals who claim to represent the cohort of those who elected them, only to serve to satisfy the agendas of their superiors and themselves. How perfect for you! Because the moment you graduate, leaving behind a legacy of incompetent spending and fictions, you’ll find yourself with just another white-haired clown standing above you.