I don’t see how Reality Check candidates and supporters can simultaneously promote sustainability and increased student parking. The limitation of campus parking is an explicit planning tactic to discourage students to drive to campus. Because personal transportation is the largest single contributor of anthropogenic carbon to the atmosphere, encouraging more students to drive to campus doesn’t really bode well for campus sustainability.
You want to promote sustainability? Tell kids to get out of their cars and ride a bike. Tell the administration we don’t want new buildings that aren’t as sustainable as possible, which means no more inefficient glass boxes sitting in self-aggrandizing, wasteful ponds. Tell the administration we don’t accept the paving of our green spaces for parking lots, as is slated for the area next to the urban farm.
While Reality Check’s goals seem kind of nice for us students, they don’t really go any deeper than that. Cool, more parking spaces. Right on, more football tickets. Sweet, you’re in with the Greek community. Though the former two might be “tangible benefits,” they don’t really offer much to our campus community, do they? They’re merely appeals to the broadest coalitions possible in an exercise of election-seeking. We call that populism.
Though many of us may indeed benefit in a very, very small way from more football tickets and more pavement to park our cars on, those are not really the key to a healthier and more sustainable campus community. If those really form the bottom line for the McCafferty-Williams slate and their supporters, I’d say they’re in need of a reality check themselves: There are much bigger issues facing our campus, kids, and we need people who actually want to tackle them.
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