For the left, COVID-19 has become the blank check of their dreams.
In another example of how liberals are using the “pandemic” to demand the fulfillment of every item on their wish list, students at Tulane University are demanding that the school include in its coronavirus response a divestment from fossil fuels and a $15 minimum wage.
The demands are found in a student-authored letter, which argues that such left-wing policies are the only way students will feel that they can safely return to campus. In addition to the aforementioned issues, the “Spring 2021 Demands” letter reasserts students’ previous calls to abolish campus police and hand out reparations to the descendants of slaves who worked on the plantation that became Tulane’s campus.
The letter starts by saying virtual-learning options should be given to students and professors, a reasonable request considering the possible health risks the virus poses to those who are immunocompromised or otherwise vulnerable. Then, however, the demands begin to devolve into fanciful territory.
For example, the letter says a pass/fail grading option should be available until more vaccines are distributed. Then, the signatories claim that “having a low income is a health concern” and that because fossil fuels cause hurricanes, they make CDC guidelines for the pandemic harder to follow.
“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 letter reads. “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.”
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In support of its demand for a $15 minimum wage, the letter states:
Given the increased amount of financial uncertainty for university employees and their families, it is vital that the university provide sufficient and sustainable income. Having a low income is a health concern as individuals may not be able to cover visits to the doctor or other vital medical expenses. Currently, medical issues are the highest cause of bankruptcy in the United States, which is a severe concern as we are in the middle of a pandemic and global recession.
One of the letter’s signatories is Tulane’s Black Student Union, which had previously sent a list of demands to administrators in July. The list inspired four others, such as one advocating the abolition of campus police.
A list of demands written by the university residential assistants claimed they have been “mistreated, undervalued, and overworked” due to the pandemic.
One Tulane student, senior Rachel Altman, opined that the authors of the COVID-19 letter would be more successful if they didn’t include unrelated demands.
“These ideas don’t belong in a plan that was meant to improve upon the school’s fall COVID response,” Altman said. “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.”
The signers of the letter haven’t helped their cause with their public conduct. Despite their ostensible concern with the virus, they openly disregarded the school social-distancing policy for anti-police protests and were forced to shut down a protest in September for again violating COVID-related restrictions.
This led to the activists spreading “unfounded and dishonest conspiracy theories” about Tulane’s coronavirus response, a move that Altman says damaged their credibility with the college’s administration.
A spokesman for the school stated that it shares the activists’ goals “to provide a safe, equitable, and productive learning environment for all members of our academic community.”
The demands by Tulane’s students are not unlike those of the United Teachers Los Angeles union, which proclaimed that the Los Angeles Unified School District cannot safely reopen until “privately operated publicly funded charter schools are shut down, police are defunded, Medicare-for-All government-run health care is passed, a statewide wealth tax is implemented, housing for homeless is fully funded,” and more.
What do defunding the police and a statewide wealth tax have to do with coronavirus? In the heads of leftists, everything is connected in some way. Any crisis can be exploited to bring about their envisioned socialist utopia.
As a radical with the left-wing Students for a Democratic Society famously said, “The issue is never the issue. The issue is always the revolution.”
It appears Tulane’s students have learned that lesson well.
