Connor Cushman is a former opinion columnist for the Siskiyou. It’s said, that the end of winter term he took to the mountains where he now farms sheep and practices running. Summoned by the people in this time of need, he returned from the wilderness to publish this piece. It was not written on a stone tablet, but it might as well have been.
A few weeks ago I sat in a room with the chair of the communications department and some guy who looked uncomfortable and was told by both of them in varying degrees of you’re-shit-out-of-luck that due to the university’s current retrenchment situation the Siskiyou would no longer be offered as a course through SOU.
I spent the majority of the meeting looking at my feet and wondering if we could make a Disney original movie out of “Saving the Siskiyou” where Selena Gomez (we have the same body type) cooks up a wacky bake sale and everyone chips in and “We’re All In This Together” plays at the end. Unfortunately, Ms. Gomez hasn’t answered any of my letters, and the licensing for the High School Musical soundtrack is worth more than I have in my piggy bank.
Finally, we ended up settling on a GoFundMe account, which as of recent has garnered a substantial amount of support, which is awesome, with one exception.
The Siskiyou was recently notified by SOU that GoFundMe isn’t a qualified medium for the school to accept money, which logically is in the same school of thought as a homeless person turning down a twenty because he “only accepts hundreds”. This leads us at the Siskiyou to think, “Seriously?” We have money for a 50-foot effigy to SOU’s best quarterback to be cut by the Atlanta Falcons but we can’t keep communications classes afloat? Now I’m aware that our university’s construction budget and academic budget are completely different entities, but maybe let’s give that construction guy a crack at our academics, because he seems to be ballin’ pretty hard these days.
Honestly, if SOU continues to cut classes at this rate the only two majors on the fall 2017 catalog will be “Stay at Home Parent” and “Hiking the PCT,” which coincidentally are easier degrees to receive than communications. The Siskiyou provides more than just credits to this community. It provides real.f*ckin’.news. And when you take that away you don’t just rob the seven students in the class of writing, you rob an average viewership of 500 people of reading, and you rob the students of SOU of the right to know what’s happening around them. So please, nut up SOU, and pay for the paper, or else the top three google searches for Southern Oregon University will be:
- This Article
- “This Siskiyou” GoFundMe
- That College Ty Burrell went to for one year
