Letter to the Board of Trustees

Dear Mr. Board of Trustees Chairman,

You've asked the Dowling community to have patience, but I wonder if you have confused patience with privilege. You see, I think the Dowling community has shown a great amount of patience over the years. Professors have taken pay cuts in order to help Dowling avoid financial ruin. Students have remained loyal to Dowling despite various articles and talk about the college's decline over the years. We have stood by Dowling despite adversity because we are patient, what we are not, is privileged.

Patience is a willingness to accept that a situation is complicated. Patience is the willingness to wait to see what happens before casting judgment. We have done that. Even in our anger, most of us have attempted to give the Board of Trustees the benefit of the doubt. If we were privileged, we may have even been willing to put our education and career goals on hold while the Board tries to figure things out; the fact of the matter is we are not. Mr. Chairman I ask you, if your child came to you and needed money for an extra semester or year in college, could you afford it? Of course you could, but unfortunately most of our families cannot. That's the difference between patience and privilege.

I ask you, Mr. One Percenter, if your child had a chronic illness and was about to age out of his or her health insurance, would you brush off your child's suffering and tell them to be patient? If instead of the throne of privilege you currently sit on, you lived the modest lifestyle of an adjunct professor; would you be patient as you failed to have the ability to pay your mortgage, electrical bills and provide quality education and health care for your children? Would you tell your loved ones to be patient?

Screw you Mr. Board of Trustee Chairman and your call for patience. You have the resources needed to be patient. Your children will never know what it is to work a minimum wage job, take out thousands of dollars of student loans, go to school full time and still not have enough to make ends meet. You Sir are severely out of touch with the issues at hand. We, unlike the Board of Trustees, are not a community of successful businessmen and women. We are the other 99%, the middle and working class. We have climbed greater mountains than you will ever comprehend, through patience and endurance. We are the community of men and woman who have made sacrifices and plunged ourselves into debt and hardship in hopes of creating better futures.

To you, Mr. Entitlement, Dowling is nothing more than a business endeavor, but hear me loud and clear; we are not commodities. We are not game pieces for you to move around your Monopoly board. We are students with hopes and dreams that you have no right to put on hold. Save your little Washington Consensus BS for your own business, don't fuck with us.