“If Ben Franklin had gotten his way, we would be eating the national bird right now,” said student Reginald Archibald.
Photo by Jordan Whitlow
At a press conference last week, Chancellor Pradeep K. Khosla announced he would be permanently abolishing the UC San Diego Thanksgiving holiday. “I’m tired of hearing all your complaints about how short Thanksgiving break is, year in and year out,” Khosla said. “If you ask me, you brats should have been thankful for the two days we gave you. So to teach you the true meaning of thankfulness, I’ve decided to take them away from you, just like the pilgrims did all those years ago. It’s like I’m the only one acknowledging the holiday properly nowadays.”
Student reactions to the news have been overwhelmingly negative, with one organization, Turkeys for Thanksgiving, holding daily protests on campus. “I asked myself, ‘What will attract the largest number of students?’ and the idea hit me on the head, like the sky was falling!” said third-year and Turkeys for Thanksgiving founder Daffy “Woodstock” Ping. “Students love nothing more than watching people eat poultry outside the library, so our club has been eating entire turkeys right there every day. Either because library hours are reduced, or because turkeys are much more impressive than chickens, we’ve been attracting a majority of the student body every day. Our message is clear: if the Chancellor does not give us the entire week off for Thanksgiving, we will start eating bald eagles.”
Khosla responded to the protests through an email to the UCSD student body. “I was fine to sit by whilst you practiced the American values of protesting loudly and eating too much turkey, but stealing the land around Geisel is where I draw the line,” he wrote. “Frankly, the lot of you are racist for even wanting time off for Thanksgiving. I thought you would have learned better being educated here at UCSD, where we take matters of great sensitivity, like racial and religious conflicts, very seriously and give them the utmost respect. The university will likewise require you to prove you are not racist and complete a mandatory five-minute sensitivity training.”
Members of Turkeys for Thanksgiving reportedly responded to Khosla’s email by copying and pasting the official UCSD land acknowledgement and then signing their own names at the bottom, and are actively encouraging other students to do the same. “Honestly, I doubt anyone in administration has really read the thing, and the first time I heard it, it really resonated with me,” said Turkeys for Thanksgiving member Devlin Patrick Hodges. “But after the shine of the first few times you hear it wears off, you realize that those empty words are pretty much the extent of what the university does for Native Americans. We at Turkeys for Thanksgiving deeply condemn this lack of sincerity, but if all the university deals in is token gestures, we will use that to our advantage to reclaim the time off that we deserve.”
Khosla later held a press conference apologizing for his actions. “I’m sorry, students, I just get heated sometimes,” he said. “How could you be racist when you’re capable of writing such beautiful and original words, all of you? I am a little touchy about my precious grass around Geisel, since it’s been taken from me in the past. You can eat your turkeys anywhere else on campus and I’ll give you Thanksgiving week off, as long as you all agree to stay off of my land — that land belongs to me and no one else.”
