BU Administration: We Can’t Endorse YesOn3, It’s Too Much Work

Dear Members of the BU Community:As you may know, the upcoming Massachusetts ballot contains YesOn3: a vote on whether to maintain statewide protections for transgender people in public places. Joining 26 other colleges and universities in Massachusetts in endorsing a movement that will uphold the basic human rights of transgender people in the state of Massachusetts, including those on our own campus, is extremely important.However, we hope you support us when we say that endorsing YesOn3 would simply involve too much difficult paperwork that we don’t feel like doing.When we walk through campus and see the names of Martin Luther King Jr and Howard Thurman, we are reminded of their admirable efforts to build a country of equality, fairness, justice, and freedom for all. However, we must recognize it for what it was: effort.When our lawyers explained the process of endorsing YesOn3, we were horrified. You see, such an endorsement involves more than just standing in favor of equality. We must ask our lawyers to write official legal documents, then sign those documents, which requires exercising our hand muscles. This is not just one piece of paper, mind you, but multiple pieces. You must understand how annoying this would be for us.Paperwork also takes up space on our desks, which are not much more than double the size of the desks in your own dorm rooms. Each member of our staff has three computer monitors that fill the entire back half of their desks, and between our coffee mugs, glue sticks, bottles of vermouth, pictures of our tudor mansions, and oil paintings of our families, nobody has room for a stack of papers as thick as those required to endorse YesOn3.Also, endorsing YesOn3 would destroy the environment. Each piece of paper we print destroys 0.012% of a tree, losing 0.00000000000003% of the Amazon rainforest. While our requests for you to purchase thousand-page textbooks and print countless papers and assignments that can easily be emailed are innovative educational practices that we wholeheartedly support, in this instance, printing paper is unjustifiable.Finally—and this one is important—our pens are out of ink.There are many advantages to our decision not to endorse YesOn3, which we simply do not have the time or energy to explain. We just finished doing so much paperwork for the Wheelock merger and all these new buildings, and we’re really exhausted. Yet we are confident that you all, being the bright and progressive students you are, will understand and support our remarkable decision, and will speak up if you don’t.We realize now that we have likely spent more time writing this letter to you than it would have taken to write and sign paperwork to endorse YesOn3. Thank you for your undying support, dear friends. As your faithful administration, we strive to continue speaking out in your best interest, so long as it is convenient for us.Sincerely,The BU Administration