The lactation rooms will be changed to Just Walk Out markets.
Photo by Dylan Schmidt
At around noon on September 17th, UC San Diego’s first available move-in day, a child less than a year old was reportedly heard crying in certain areas of campus — an event described by many students as “slightly intrusive” and “not that big of a deal in the grand scheme of things.”
This event prompted a massive outburst from a “small but mighty” section of the student body striving to ban all young children from campus. Anita Naval, who boasts of being “three steps beyond childfree,” created the student group Partners in Thwarting Adolescents (PTA) with the goal of making UCSD a “place for very grown-up stuff,” per the group’s belief that “even a single child can completely ruin a student’s academic success.”
PTA has yet to provide sources that suggest one’s grades can decrease at such a fast pace (or at all), but Naval claims that “it is one billion percent true.”
In response to hours of the group’s protests, Chancellor Pradeep Khosla announced that the school will ban all children under the age of five from campus in order to “promote learning and stop those annoying-ass sounds they make.” While currently unclear how the policy will be enforced on an open campus, Khosla promises that it “will be through any means necessary.”
The new policy garnered criticism from many individuals, including current UCSD student and single parent Sarah Vix, who believes that this policy unfairly targets already vulnerable student–parents.
“You know, when I was first expecting, I would have never expected that so many people would place their expectations of perfection on me and my kid. It was entirely unexpected,” she said.
Additionally, Owen Um, a student planning to live on campus, questions how often he’ll be able to see his family, as his “mom can’t really leave [his] little sister at home — she can barely even walk, much less fend off the pitbulls.”
Student Parents Organizing Rights Educationally (SPORE), an organization formed in opposition to PTA, has put out an announcement criticizing the new policy, claiming, “it is already hard enough for single parents to get housing on campus, and this policy makes it functionally illegal.”
In response to their statement, Khosla sent out an announcement condemning SPORE for “promoting the selfish production of crotch goblins, then inflicting them on the rest of us.”
As the new policy begins to take effect, Anita Naval is looking forward to all of the new initiatives that PTA can take now that “they truly have a voice on this campus.” Naval is “hoping to remove all 10-year-olds by the beginning of Winter quarter, and maybe even have [her] patented child-launcher installed in a year or so to create the most smartest [sic] and adult campus on Earth.”
Cole was born in 1984, a few months after the "incident". He is currently majoring in Mad Science, with a specialization in explosions. He is most know for growing mold in various bathrooms.
