The student senate at Ohio University kicked out at the world with an ambitious agenda that includes an increase in the minimum wage on campus from the current rate of $7.95 per hour to $15 per hour.
The world has now kicked back, considerably harder.
The student council at the taxpayer-funded school in Athens, Ohio approved a resolution on Oct. 8 seeking an 89 percent increase in the minimum wage for undergrads.
“How do we shift dynamics?” student senator Jacob Chaffin said at the meeting, according to The College Fix.
“Looking at history, when making these demands, it takes organizing people,” he added.
Richard Vedder, an emeritus professor at Ohio University and a nationally-recognized economist, has since called the proposed minimum wage increase a “horrendously bad idea.”
“Many people would favor a higher minimum wage,” Vedder said, according to the Fix. However, “making these huge demands comes across as sort of a radical move, and these people are clueless about economic reality.” (RELATED: Socialist Party Demanding $20 Minimum Wage Insists It Should Not Be Subject To $20 Minimum Wage)
The Ohio U. student Senate has also called for much else. Student council members want a tuition freeze, a rule outlawing any pay raises for school officials who make over $200,000 annually, and immediate divestment from fossil fuels for the state school’s endowment.
Stephen Golding, the school’s vice president for finance, noted that the demands are hopelessly contradictory. For example, an 89 percent increase in the minimum wage for students would likely “require a tuition increase to cover the cost of the wage increase,” he said, according to the Fix. (RELATED: Obama Wants Daughters To Work Crappy Minimum-Wage Jobs So They Understand America)
Vedder, the economist, did concede that the Ohio U. administration could easily purge the administration of “several” bureaucrats “without any qualitative loss whatsoever.”
Ohio University is, of course, best known as one of America’s hardest-partying schools. (RELATED: VIDEO PROOF: The Definitive List Of America’s Most EPIC Party Schools)
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