Destructive Pitt
The following letter to the editor appeared
in the
Pittsburgh
Post-Gazette on April 5, 2013
The time has come for a new beginning for the community of Oakland.
Recently the city of Pittsburgh filed a lawsuit challenging the tax-exempt nonprofit status of UPMC. This same act of courage must be initiated against the University of Pittsburgh.
Would you want a university to impact your community the way the University of Pittsburgh has impacted Oakland? This impact involves university administrators taking ownership of 90 buildings in your community, building 8,000 dormitory beds, increasing enrollment to 27,000 students, persuading state authorities to invoke eminent domain thus evicting you and your neighbors from your homes so that university buildings could be erected, giving your residential organizations a paltry $23,000 a year in direct funding, and then have them tell you to start a Neighborhood Improvement District to resolve your problems such as litter, trash and binge drinking.
Our grassroots movement -- SOUL (South Oakland Urban Litter) -- will continue, as will our efforts not to permit Pitt administrators to dictate how we in our community are going to live. Our efforts are well documented on the website www.oaklanddignity.com. We have once again called for the resignation of Chancellor Mark Nordenberg in messages placed recently in The Pitt News.
Members of the Pittsburgh City Council and the mayor will have to search
their own consciences as to what actions they should take to stop the
decimation and desecration of a once vibrant multicultural residential
community.
Carlino Giampolo
Oakland
- Original letter as it appears on Post-Gazette.com: http://www.post-gazette.com/stories/opinion/letters/destructive-pitt-682203/
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Update: On June 28, 2013 Chancellor Mark Nordenberg announced that he is retiring on August 1, 2014. It is our hope that the chancellor will move his retirement date forward to the present.
OaklandDignity.com |