LAUTECH CRISIS: An Interview With ASUU Chairman

For over eight months, lecturers and non-academic staff at the Ladoke Akintola University of Technology downed tools due to non-payment of salaries and allowances.
The staff also complained of others issues like inadequate funding of the university, jointly owned by the Osun and Oyo state governments.
In January, the owner states gave the university N500 million and the management called for a reopening of the institution. However, the lecturers, ASUU, said they would not resume.
In this exclusive interview with PREMIUM TIMES’ Olanrewaju Samuel, the chairman of ASUU at the university, Biodun Olaniran, spoke on his members’ decision.
Mr. Olaniran, a senior lecturer in Entomology / Pesticide Toxicology, also spoke on funding of the university, corruption and other issues.
PREMIUM TIMES: The current shutdown rocking LAUTECH has caused a lot of controversies, can you tell us the genesis of the whole disagreements?
ASUU CHAIR: The disagreements emanated from non-release of subventions to the university and subsequent use of internally generated revenue to offset salaries.
PREMIUM TIMES: How has LAUTECH been surviving till now? Why wait till the debt owed got to tune of N7.6 billion before acting?
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And Furthermore...

The other thing that's getting up my nose about Neil Gorsuch and his 'originalist' approach to the law is that he writes essays about how if you don't like the law you should work to elect legislators that can change the law, then leave it to the judiciary to adjudicate.

This is in perfect alignment with Gorsuch originalist views, which leave anything not explicitly in the constitution up to the states. The issue is twofold. For starters (as explained in earlier posts) the constitution itself is a historical document, written by some well-meaning people with no concept of modern society. The second issue is that the legislative system itself is broken: the poor are being disenfranchised at every opportunity, the system is rife with corruption and more influenced by money than the actual will of the people, and also your elected legislators pass some very, very bad laws. If you are a bible-humping neocon like Gorsuch you just shrug and say well, abortion isn't explicitly mentioned in the constitution, and all life is precious because Jesus died for our sins and God loves you, so I hope you enjoy your pregnancy and resulting unwanted child and also it's too bad your insurance doesn't cover birth control but hey that's the way it goes. Not sure what coddled world he lives in, but applying leverage through the legislative branch is not an option for much of the country. It's almost as though he doesn't care, which, hey, about that...

Gorsuch also approves of discrimination on religious grounds. This has been couched as 'religious freedom', which: lol. It is actually a form of enabled discrimination. Most famously it entitles your employer to pick and choose your health care coverage to exclude contraception, because they don't believe in it. Can you imagine working at a place and finding out that basic contraception is not covered because your employer doesn't think you should have access to birth control? I think it's perfectly fair if they provided no coverage at all, but why do they get to choose what is and is not covered? Hobby Lobby was able to get this through the court because they convinced the (five male, Catholic) justices that their belief that certain contraceptives cause abortions (a provably false claim, btw), and providing those contraceptives to their employees is a violation of their religious freedom. In other words: hey I believe this to be true because Jesus, and you can't tell me otherwise, because Jesus. And hey what a weird coincidence that all you guys are Catholic and are voting against a womans right to reproductive health!

This is what we are up against. The ghost of Scalia lives on, and thinking people must keep putting that man and his discriminatory views in the trash where they belong.
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