Education

The First Fancypants College Obama Attended Has Canceled Its Football Season Due To Lack Of Players

YouTube screenshot/Jeremy Bloom, Getty Images/Chip Somodevilla, YouTube screenshot/Comedy Central

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The mediocre private liberal arts college that President Barack Obama attended from 1979 to 1981 — before wisely transferring to Columbia University as a junior — has canceled the rest of its current football season due to a shortage of players.

The school, Occidental College in Los Angeles, forfeited two of its first five games because its football team only has “around 35 players, including one healthy defensive lineman,” according to CBS Sports.

Occidental is an NCAA Division III school that competes in the Southern California Intercollegiate Athletic Conference — with the likes of Whittier College, the University of Redlands and some Claremont Colleges consortium schools.

A single year of tuition, fees and room and board at Occidental costs $67,806. A four-year stint at the fancypants bastion of liberal arts costs $271,224.

Occidental College president Jonathan Veitch said the decision to cancel the football season “was not made lightly.”

“No one wanted or expected the season to end this way. Making this decision now provides needed clarity to players, their parents, coaches, and other SCIAC members,” Veitch said in the statement obtained by USA Today.

“This decision falls hardest on our players and coaching staff, whose competitive spirit has never waned. I want to commend first-year Oxy head coach Rob Cushman for his character and grit, having been thrust into the most challenging of circumstances this season,” Veitch also said.

Before forfeiting the season, the Occidental Tigers had been outscored 170-19 this season.

A male student athlete at Occidental College filed a Title IX lawsuit in 2014 after a pseudonymous female student accused him of rape and he ended up expelled. An Occidental professor, Danielle Dirks, declared that the male student “fit the profile of other rapists on campus in that he had a high GPA in high school, was his class valedictorian, was on [a sports] team, and was ‘from a good family.'” The female student who later accused the male student of rape texted him “do you have a condom” and sendt a separate, eager, smiley-face text to friend reading “I’mgoingtohave sex now” [sic]. (RELATED: Professor At Obama’s First College Brands College Student Rapist Because He Got Good Grades, Played Sports And Was ‘From A Good Family’)

In 2015, a group of pampered minority students at Occidental called Oxy United for Black Liberation pretended to occupy a campus building and issued a list of 14 demands, which included “mandatory” racial re-education workshops for all professors and employees. Other demands insisted on the “the immediate removal” of both the Los Angeles Police Department and Veitch, Occidental’s president, from campus.

“We have 14 demands which include an increase of faculty and staff of color, umm, a black studies program, more funding for, umm, students of color to do more programming and room speakers. Umm, and so we want that by Friday,” Black Student Alliance vice president Mika Cribbs — dressed in a dashing spaghetti-strap camisole — told Los Angeles television station KTLA.

A few hundred protesting students pressed on with their demands by moving from their posh dorm rooms to an administrative building for a festive slumber party. There were sleeping bags. There was delivered pizza.

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