The only time we feel jealous is when someone comes up with a hilarious pun before we get the chance to. It happened to us this week, though, at Florida Atlantic University.
“The public university announced last week that it had struck a deal to name its football stadium after GEO Group Inc., one of the largest operators of for-profit prisons in the U.S. and a major donor to the Florida Republican Party,” according to the Huffington Post. “In exchange, FAU will receive $6 million from the company over 12 years.”
“The $6 million donation over 12 years would grant naming rights of the stadium to the GEO Group, who have had charges filed against them for several human rights violations, including sexual misconduct in their youth detention facilities and illegal drug smuggling,” according to University Press, FAU’s campus newspaper.
At the Walnut Grove Youth Correctional Facility, a GEO Group property in Mississippi, a report issued by the Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Department of Justice found that the institution was “deliberately indifferent to staff sexual misconduct and inappropriate behavior with youth. The sexual misconduct we found was among the worst that we have seen in any facility anywhere in the nation,” according to the Huffington Post.
“I don’t know all the answers, I don’t know everything about this company. I do know that there are some things that have been discussed that may not be true,” President Mary Jane Saunders said in a statement that prompted one student to ask if she was being serious, according to SB Nation.
About 50 students staged a sit-in by the president’s office this week to protest the school’s decision.
“Saunders ultimately granted the protesters’ demand for a town-hall-style discussion of the fiasco, to be held Friday — at high noon — in the football stadium’s recruiting room, ironically,” according to a Broward Palm Beach New Times blog post.
Look at them, getting things done the democratic way. Is there any way a group of students can go against such a large price tag during “tough economic times”?
“The board of trustees should have done due diligence on GEO before they signed that agreement,” Gonzalo Vizcardo, the leader of the student protest group called Stop Owlcatraz, told The Palm Beach Post.
That’s right. The Stop Owlcatraz Coalition. How perfect is that pun? We’re jealous.
We’re not jealous of the fact that a for-profit prison company is about to own major property on another college campus. We’re not jealous that a company that has tolerated, to any degree, the mistreatment of youth within some of their detention centers has such a high amount of expendable cash to throw $6 million at a public university.
We don’t care what charities the GEO Group donates to. We don’t want them to come anywhere near our definitely prestigious institution.
Do you think FAU will just give back the $6 million grant? Probably not. What a great pun.
