I sent the following email to UAF’s chancellor today, without much hope for making a difference but I felt it necessary nonetheless. To add to its impact I copied our campus newspaper as well, though in hindsight wished I had copied the Fairbanks News-Miner too.

Chancellor,

I just witnessed a remarkable sight on campus. A UAF trash compacting truck is presently backed up to Gruening, and a handfull of UAF workers are loading perfectly good desks into it (the kind where the chair is attached to the desk), one by one. As they are crushed more and more are added. I witnessed at least 20 be destroyed in as many mintues. I wondered, what offense could these desks have committed that they aren’t being reused here, or donated elsewhere, but will instead end up as tangles of metal and particleboard in a landfill? Curious, I checked one out - indeed it was in perfect condition!

It seems to me that universities need to be the institutions that set an example for the rest of our society, if real change is going to happen that averts ecological catastrophe and allows us, as a species, to inhabit this beautiful planet for a while longer. The display outside of Gruening is not an example of this new thinking, but of the thinking of old minds - “Out of sight, out of mind.”

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