LSU, you need to sort out your priorities.
This past week, many students lined the Student Union’s Capital Chamber to protest proposed new tailgating rules during a town hall, according to The Daily Reveille.
Y’all are right. The new rules are draconian and senseless. Many of the new rules will not promote public safety and seem poorly thought-out.
I am glad many of y’all have been involved in the public policy process. However, the way you talk about these rules is almost as unreasonable as the rules themselves.
One student somehow thought it was appropriate to compare the new rules to the Holocaust on Twitter.
Another ludicrous cherry on top of this debacle are the Greeks shouting discrimination, when white Greek organizations in the United States were founded on the idea of exclusion.
Lawrence Ross, author of “Blackballed: The Black and White Politics of Race on America’s Campuses,” wrote: “The DNA of these organizations, if you go back, these predominantly white fraternities in particular were created after the Civil War with the expansion of college to non-aristocratic students.”
Part of the exclusion was requiring an entrance fee to shut out working class students, but other restrictions were obviously racist in their founding.
“Organizations on those campuses, they started to put restrictive clauses that restricted membership to white Christians and sometimes they would say you had to be ‘Aryan,’ so it was a long fight just to get African Americans to join their organizations,” Ross said.
Just because you find a policy unfavorable doesn’t make it discrimination. The affected group must have a history of discrimination toward it.
For these white Greek organizations to claim discrimination ranges from infuriating to hilarious.
I can’t wait for the day when your organizations endorse a black student for president or vice president of Student Government. But that will probably be 20 years from now, and I’m sure y’all will feel so progressive then.
That doesn’t mean Greek organizations haven’t gotten better or aren’t trying to do better than they have in the past, but they still have a lot of work to do.
I’m also sick of people who don’t benefit from this system defending it. Many of the people hosting these tailgating parties are the same ones calling you a slur behind your back. Why defend them?
I really wish the same people who showed up in force to protest these rules would protest budget cuts and the sexual assaults that have primarily occurred during game-day weekends. The University could have closed down because of a lack of funding, meaning no tailgating or football games.
Where were the protests then? By choosing to protest tailgating rules, students have picked football over their own school remaining open.
No wonder our university has been slammed with budget cuts. Students don’t protest when the University is threatened with closure.
Maybe the state legislature needs to regulate tailgating to get students to care about funding their own futures. Until then, we’re screwed if we don’t sort out our priorities.
Michael Beyer is a 22-year-old political science senior from New Orleans.

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