Dear Editor,

Our primary goal is to defend public education by engaging and empowering students. We are not the out-of-touch idealists featured in your article and editorial on Jan. 26. The renovation of CLICS was not announced in response to the reclamation last quarter. It was announced in an A.S. Council press release on September 30, 2011. Last year the council killed an $8 student fee to save CLICS, but now it wants to pass a $165 fee for Division-I sports. Although students have taken responsibility for running CLICS, we have not set its hours, we did not know or plan for it to be open and University Centers closes the building every night. The administration did not “invite student input” about re-opening CLICS. They re-opened CLICS without communication or negotiation, and only afterwards did they email students. For a student-run newspaper, your editorial board is surprisingly cynical about student-run organizations. The $370,000 you said it would take to run old CLICS is irrelevant to whether students can run a 100-seat study space in the new “Galbraith Hall” (named for Chancellor John S. Galbraith and his lifelong commitment to libraries which have lost 16% of their budget to UCSD).  Running CLICS costs $450,000 annually, but renovation will cost $6.7 million to run CLICS about 15 years. We urge the Guardian to be a voice for students and support student movements in the future. We invite students, faculty and staff to help us reclaim public education on Mondays at 7 p.m. at CLICS or email [email protected] to get involved in mobilizing for the international day of action on March 1 and the walkout and reclamation of the capitol in Sacramento on March 5.

—Kevin Quirolo
Senior, Marshall College
—Patrick Saris
Senior, Sixth College
—Sean Estelle
Junior, Sixth College
—Nickolai Smith
Graduate, Department of Sociology