WSU's Troublemakers Aren't Much Trouble

Darn! They just don’t make campus troublemakers the way they used to. Or at least, they don’t make them around here the way they do in Berkeley. Now down there, even though they don’t raise holy heck the way they did back in the sixties and seventies, they still know how to entertain. Up here in the Great Northwest, the most that can be said of campus activists is that they are a bit boring.

Shortly after I spread my copy of the Thursday edition of the Moscow-Pullman Daily News across my knees for my evening read, I came across the disappointing news that a compromise had been reached in the tree standoff between Washington State University and local tree huggers who were trying to preserve a few trees from chainsaws. WSU had already removed a few trees and planned to remove a few more as part of its efforts to make the older, western side of campus more accessible for the handicapped.

Shortly after the project was started this summer and after a few trees were felled, bored local tree huggers leapt into action and expressed their indignation by creating a website. It was a website with photos of the threatened trees, poetry, odes to “the fallen,” and an online petition. It was a far cry from the protests I recall from my college days.

Apparently, this is what campus activism has come to. A website. How about a virtual protest? Maybe the campus cops can create their own website where they would spray the virtual protesters with electronic tear gas. We could have riots using World of Warcraft interactive computer games. Why not? WSU brags about being a “wired campus.”
And even though protests at the University of California, Berkeley put WSU’s to shame, even Berkeley’s campus activists have tempered their passions. They even have their own save the trees protest in progress that we can use for comparison. In late 2006, when it was learned that the University planned to remove a small grove of trees to make room for a new athletic center, tree huggers scurried up those trees and have resided there ever since. Like WSU’s trees, Berkeley’s were part of a landscaping project and therefore are not really part of a heritage, except perhaps, the long dead landscape architect’s. The species is not in any way endangered. There are millions of them in Alameda county and well over 100 million statewide.

I was sort of looking forward to watching WSU activists trying to spend the upcoming winter in a tree, although they probably would have just Photoshopped pictures of themselves in the tree and posted it on their website.

Wimpy protests are something of a WSU tradition. Perhaps 15 years ago, a group of activists announced that they would be spending the night on Terrell Mall to raise awareness for the plight of the homeless. They lasted only until about midnight, when they decided that it was getting too cold, so they went home, claiming that they had made their point and there was no reason for them to suffer any more discomfort.

I recently discovered another wimpy WSU protest. For the last six months or so, I have noticed that urinals are frequently left unflushed in the men’s rooms. At last I actually happened upon one of these non-flushers and challenged his hygiene.
Did he need instructions on how to operate the appliance? Was he marking his territory? Perhaps it the finest thing he that had produced all day, and he wanted to leave it for others to admire?

“No,” he sheepishly answered. He informed me that the plague of unflushed toilets on campus was part of a protest of Washington State University’s water use policies.

“If it’s yellow, let it mellow.”

Ah well, every great cause needs a good slogan.

After all, he explained, the flush water was only going to irrigate WSU’s new golf course, which many disapprove of. Not only is the golf course a playground for the wealthy, but it’s a waste of precious groundwater. In fact, another group of campus activists has been protesting that same issue, although I don’t thing this latter group has yet mustered the gumption to even make a website.

So Washington State University is not just fighting for its right to rearrange its landscaping, it is engaged with protesters with poor bathroom habits for the right to irrigate its landscaping.

Somehow I doubt that WSU’s brand of protests will ever make it into the history books.