Sweat over something more important

This quote struck me last week: “air conditioning must be the top priority for sabbaticals”. This is possibly one of the stupidest, most ignorant statements ever committed to this paper. Everybody knows that the library is hot from floors three upwards, and as a result a petition has been signed by over a thousand people in support of air conditioning, but the idea of spending £13.5 million on what is essentially an unnecessary luxury is ludicrous and the union is better off concentrating on actual pressing issues.

There is also a problem with the way in which we have tried to go about achieving this issue – at a university with such consistently low student satisfaction ratings, what makes any of us think that they would go out of their way to view a petition that can be signed by anybody on a website which, unlike the tobacco industry, Imperial College London has no links to.

One comment on the online version of last week’s article also addresses the fact that you can use your own self-volition to write a council paper and propose that the union take a stance and petition for this change rather than writing a snotty article to indirectly accuse the union of not doing enough to represent the Imperial student body. This mentality is one constantly exhibited by Imperial students: they are unhappy with the state of certain things around campus but are either too lazy or indifferent to actually exact any change or do anything at university that isn’t study or drink.

The principal problem with this mentality is that frankly it’s just selfish and ignorant: if the library is too hot, revise somewhere else – you can go to SAF, various engineering departments’ study rooms, cafe’s, your own room, or maybe, god forbid, you could do something other than study. It just seems so selfish, childish, and naive to claim that the priority of the organisation that is meant to represent the entirety of the Imperial student population should not focus on the crisis of housing, the increase in tuition fees, the abysmal waiting times for the imperial college health centre, the low student satisfaction that Imperial perpetually maintains, or the lack of funding for 5th and 6th year medical students. Instead, their priority should be on making yourself more comfortable when you do your work when there are plenty of alternatives that don’t cost £13.5 million.

Now, in the paraphrased words of Aubrey Graham, "I took a break from revision, now it’s back to that."

Um, please sign our petition here.