You are a lemming.
Each year, as a student at the University at Buffalo, you will mindlessly fill out your online parking permit request, file down to Spaulding, attach your little permit to your car and proceed to honk, halt and screech your way into the worst parking spot possible.
You will complain about your parking spot as you trudge through the snow and slush to Clemens from the Governor's parking lot. You will get even more frustrated when your teacher marks you late for class and you may lose your cool when five or six desperate students follow you hoping to snag your parking spot.
However, you will do nothing about your unfortunate circumstance, except cry, moan and try to get to campus earlier the next day.
What happened to the "liberal" in our liberal education? Why are we willing to just deal with a situation as ridiculous and unbearable as the inadequate parking on campus instead of doing something about it?
Each year every single UB student must pay a Comprehensive Fee. Undergrads pay $988.00 and each graduate student drops about $751.00. This fee, which encompasses various things such as computers, athletics, buses, shuttles and parking adds up to roughly $41,340,500 annually.
According the UB Office of Student Accounts, parking on campus eats up about $2,402,639 each year.
What are we paying for?
We students are handing over almost $2.5 million to the university for the "convenient and orderly parking throughout campuses."
When was the last time you found your parking experience convenient or orderly?
In fact, a checklist found on UB's Parking and Transportation website shows that on North Campus there are five parking lots strictly for faculty, five for students and 16 shared lots.
On South Campus, there are five parking lots strictly for faculty, zero student lots and five shared lots.
With a student population of over 28,881 and only 1,604 full-time faculty members – making for an 18 to one student to faculty ratio – how does it make sense that the faculty has 10 exclusive parking lots while students only have five?
If the unfair distribution in the number of assigned lots isn't bad enough, teachers also get the pick of the most conveniently located parking spots on campus.
Lots such as Furnas, Farber and Diefendorf are reserved exclusively for faculty use, while student are forced to fight for parking spots by Governors and Alumni Arena.
If parking is such an issue on campus, why don't students take an active stand on it instead of just complaining about the problem while doing nothing to work toward a solution?
About 72 percent of UB students commute to campus. What if tomorrow those 20,000 students decided that they weren't going to park in student lots? What if they decided they weren't going to even use their parking permits?
On an even simpler scale, what if just 2,000 students (10 percent of commuters) woke up tomorrow and parked wherever they wanted to?
Would the school even know how to handle this form of protest?
Sure, many cars would be ticketed and some might be towed, but with a campus police force of only 42 sworn officers, they might not have the man power to tow or even ticket a percentage of those vehicles.
In addition, if those 2,000 students broke those parking regulations, chances are there would be a lot of teachers, administrators and faculty members who would finally feel the frustration and aggravation we students at UB face every day.
A peaceful, yet extremely effective protest would not only turn heads, but draw much needed attention to a problem that only worsens with each advancing year.
Of course, this protest will never happen.
Why?
Because we are lemmings. We get into our little cars, with our little parking permits and jump off that cliff into the farthest possible lot from class.
