If you and your friends don’t show up for the National L Club Spring Game in Tiger Stadium at 1 p.m. Saturday, nothing will happen.
You won’t miss a spectacle for the ages — it’s a meaningless scrimmage where nothing is set in stone and, no, you won’t get an answer on who will start at quarterback.
The same goes for Groovin’. Young the Giant will play “Cough Syrup” to starstruck students’ screams, but if you miss out, it’s not the end of the world. Your college experience won’t be drastically altered.
But it will be drastically altered if you don’t stand up for yourself and your fellow students.
Yesterday, only a handful of University students showed up on the steps of the State Capitol to protest budget cuts to higher education in an event organized by the Council of Student Body Presidents.
Now-former SG president Clay Tufts was there. He testified at the appropriations hearing alongside five others shortly after Tufts handed his title to new president Andrew Mahtook at SG’s inauguration.
That’s right — instead of celebrating the end of his term, Tufts was lobbying for his schoolmates.
What a way to repay him, LSU. Despite attendance from Southern University, Southeastern Louisiana University and LSU-Alexandria, you couldn’t be bothered to take the 15-minute drive to downtown’s 900 North 3rd Street.
Let’s again review the carnage of these proposed cuts if they are enacted.
You won’t get to take some of the classes you scheduled. You won’t get the academic advisers and tutors previously at students’ disposal.
You will watch professors and students walk away. You will see buildings continue to fall apart.
And if graduating on time was hard enough already, you can kiss a four-year exit from LSU goodbye.
This isn’t the Spring Game. This is our future.
This legislative session holds a lot of stock. The fate of our land grant university is about to be determined.
Whether we will be spared from Gov. Bobby Jindal’s crippling budget cuts or allow the door to shut as we go home is a fight University students are seemingly unwilling to take up.
For all students who have the audacity to cry “Love Purple, Live Gold,” yet do not show up to protest when we need it most, shame on you. And, yes, we’ve heard the excuses.
“We’re just students. Legislators won’t listen to us.”
How can we know if we don’t try? LSU President F. King Alexander’s frequently quoted battle cry throughout this funding debacle has been “Be annoying,” relentlessly encouraging students to contact legislators to mitigate the cuts.
This isn’t the first time we haven’t shown up.
In March, the Higher Education Forum, organized by Geaux Vote LSU, also garnered an embarrassingly slim audience. Administrators and lawmakers made themselves available to educate students and discuss cuts, but even then, no one seemed to care.
Letter-writing campaigns are underway. Demonstrations have been organized. But instead of a tiger’s roar, we hear crickets.
We’re not asking for school pride. You don’t have to love the football team, be a member of a student organization or send a Snapchat of Mike the Tiger on your morning stroll to class.
We simply ask you to be invested in the future of your education, as so many of your tireless administrators, professors and instructors already are.
Alumni before us took up fights, big and small, to make this University a better place — whether it was A.P. Tureaud calling for racial integration on our campus in 1953 or the outspoken students who protested similar cuts to higher education in 2008.
They understood there was something at stake.
Do you?
