Bye!

Over a year and a half after taking to the trees, Save the Oaks, a group protesting the University's plans to build a "Student Athlete High Performance Center" on what is now a grove playing host to 150-year-old oaks, may soon no longer have a branch to call home. That's right: The tree-sitters have lost their legal standing, which is mostly surprising because I was not aware they had any to begin with. The fact that they recently threw buckets of urine and feces at the police and requested marijuana as part of their provisions may have contributed to that idea. The university reportedly had been spending upwards of $40,000 a day on security and other costs associated with attempting to starve the protestors out of their leafy abodes.

An injunction against the University preventing construction of the center because of the possibility that it would collapse--being build on the Hayward fault line and all--has been lifted, clearing the way for the police to evict the protestors from the grove outside Memorial Stadium. Construction should begin in seven days on the We Have Nobel Laureates And We're Not Afraid To Use Them (On The Football Field) Center. Or maybe it's the We Invented the Atomic Bomb and All We Got Were These Lousy Tree Sitters Center.

In any case, while I still don't think it's right to cut down trees that have been here longer than the university in order to build a nice big gym for a bunch of athletes, it's about time we all just moved on. It was a lost cause from the beginning; there's no way Zachary RunningWolf goes up against Jeff Tedford with recruiting on the line in the wake of a 7-6 season and wins. It's ridiculous to think this will help anybody but the athletic department anyway, as I'm pretty sure medical schools consider MCAT scores a better test of your abilities than your basketball team's record, but it's high time Cal indulged in a $120 million monstrosity that serves only a select few of its student population--the select few who, I'd like to note, don't pay tuition.

When I chose to come to Cal, it was because of the 30 top-10 rated graduate schools and not the exclusive athlete clubs; the atmosphere of inclusion of people from all walks of life and not the placement of "student"-athletes on some sort "holier-than-thou" pedestal; the spirit of protest and not the police barricades preventing those brave enough to stand up for what they believe in from getting food and water. Call me a crazy hippie all you want, but I hope, at some point in all of our lives, we can find it in ourselves to determine something really is worth going out on a limb for.

Get it?