From the Board of Trustees: Divestment Sucks and So Do (Most) Trinity Students

Trustee #10,010

Board Big Shot

Last semester, a group of unruly students-turned-terrorists demanded that we, the Board of Trustees, should disclose and divest. As a leader of the incredibly moral, reasonable and anti-elitist ruling body of Trinity College, I am here to tell you why these things called “divestment” and “disclosure” do not belong at this institution, and why the students’ presentation actually sucked butt. 

To start off, allow me to define divestment and disclosure. I was forced to look these words up after the students presented to us because they refused to define them in their presentation (at least, I’m pretty sure they refused — to be honest, I fell asleep once they started talking about something called “war crimes”). Anyways, divestment basically means we would take money out of our stocks. If these students/terrorists had taken any time to look at our financial records, they would know that this is simply not possible — after losing $110 million dollars last fiscal year, we barely have the funds to give our administrators six figure salaries. What else do students pay 90K a year for, anyway? 

Disclosure apparently means “transparency.” (I also had to look this word up.) This demand is almost even more hilarious than divestment — don’t students know that the Board doesn’t even know where our money goes? Instead of meeting with our endowment manager Commonfund and having a conversation about what stocks we want to invest in, every fiscal year we summon Minty’s ghost and ask it for winning lottery numbers — the last few years have gone pretty well, except for that time Minty decided to possess our CFO and he invested in this new underground music group called the IDF. We’ve actually had a lot of returns on that one, so Minty didn’t do too bad of a job.

Alas, I digress. Let me get back to the students’ awful presentation. It wasn’t until they were lined up in front of us, the esteemed Finance Committee, that I actually realized what losers go to Trinity College. Like, we really need to have a word with admissions. I was told beforehand that the students presenting were “incredibly accomplished” and “super involved on campus.” To my surprise, they start introducing themselves and start speaking utter gibberish. One student talked about their passion for “mass incarceration” — as far as I’m aware, mass still happens in the Chapel every Sunday. Another student stated their involvement in the Writing Center — I thought we had replaced human tutors with AI chatbots a few years ago. I’ll have to have a word with the English department that apparently still exists as well. 

The presentation itself was just so difficult to listen to — the students droned on and on about humanity, civilians, CO2 and Oct. 7. At first, I was pleasantly surprised that they remembered the exact date that I reached 500 LinkedIn connections, but then I realized it had something to do with that shit in the Middle East that everyone keeps talking about. That’s when I really started to drift off. The only thing that kept me awake was knowing that the Trinity College Student Investment Fund was on the schedule to present next — finally, some real students and important ideas! I can’t say much, but TCSIF provided some really innovative tactics on how the College can “lose” another $110 million and have an excuse to admit more full paying students next year. God, those kids are great. 

I guess I should finish talking about the divestment losers — the Tripod opinion editor told me to have a call to action or something at the end of my op-ed. After looking up yet another phrase for this article, I’ll leave you with this advice: if students won’t kiss your ass, don’t even let them speak.