By Check out this update from our friends at OSU
Today, Thursday the 14th, Free The Planet members directly confronted
OSU President Gordon Gee, not once, but twice. This morning I went to
see Kate Wolford, assistant to the President and Director of Operations
here at OSU. She is one of the university’s key negotiators at the
environmental task force (the group in charge of drafting our
sustainable forest policy). I wanted to give her some photos of
clear-cuts in the Boreal forest and another copy of our demands –
seeing as how “blind-sided” she said she felt by FTP members demands for
a full forest resources policy on Tuesday I thought she might like a
refresher before today’s task force meeting. Well, Kate wasn’t there,
apparently she was already off having pre-meetings with other task force
members – but that’s ok, cuz guess who WAS there, and with no Kate as a
body guard, President Gordon Gee!
President Gee was in the middle of an international meeting with a
German university president snapping pictures of handshakes and signing
documents with fancy ink pens. No sooner than Gee suggested “let’s
congratulate ourselves” did things start going downhill for his meeting.
I walked right in (after all the door was open) and placed our demands
and clear-cut pictures right on top of all those fancy pens of theirs
and asked that President Gee please stop destroying endangered forests.
Oh man, can his brows get furled!, (and our poor international guest, he
looked so totally confused). Needless to say, the laughing & snapshots
stopped and Gee kinda flipped. Attempting to remain calm, Gee excused
himself and started jabbing me in the chest with his finger as he said,
“there is a process, you can’t just interrupt my meetings, i’ll have you
arrested!” It was all pretty comical – his fingers are pretty damn bony
though, “ouch man!”. On my way out I chatted with one of the German
reps, apologized for having to interrupt their meeting and filled him in
about our 8hr sit-in on Tuesday and told him i would have much rather
spoke with President Gee then.
Not even 20 minutes later a second Gee Interception (man, Kate, you’re
really dropping the ball here) at the president’s office happened. A
second member of Free The Planet had come in wishing to had Kate copies
of our 2,600 or so petition signatures but walked right into good old
Gordon Gee instead. This FTPer got the same rap about “process” from
President Gee (minus the finger jabbing) but Gee’s not the only one
who’s masted the broken record messaging – our FTP activist retorted
with, “your process doesn’t work for us!” It’s clear FTPers know what we
want and we’re not dealing with process any longer!!!
I guess the moral of the story here President Gee is, “your process
doesn’t work for us!” GET OUT OF ENDANGERED FORESTS NOW!