Column by Richard Becker

Tuesday, President Lee Todd and the UK Board of Trustees showed themselves to be the craven, sold-out cowards they had never before so brazenly shown themselves to be.

By voting 16-3 to rename the UK men’s basketball residence the Wildcat Coal Lodge, the majority of the men and women of the board sold out UK students and sold out Kentucky— there are so many issues with this decision that a columnist must muzzle himself if he is to meet his word count.

UK political science professor Ernest Yanarella delivered a rare moment of courage during Tuesday’s meeting as he expressed his opposition to the re-naming measure.

Yanarella, seeking to table the motion, apparently, moved to get an opinion from the UK legal counsel on the actual legality of the proposed renaming of the Wildcat Lodge. His concern was that the UK charter does not permit the board to name an official university building based on a corporate financial contribution.

Seems pretty agreeable, right?

Not if you’re the Board of Trustees. The motion was quickly quashed, ostensibly in the interest of expediting the passage of the name change motion.

Student body president Ryan Smith, speaking on behalf of the students he represents, opposed the motion to rename the lodge. Unfortunately, this courageous position was overshadowed in the ears of the anti-coal activists present when Smith referenced clean-coal technology.

His reference to this nebulous area of coal research was met with laughter and jeers from the student gallery.

He had been given a brief, put together by several students stating a very cogent position against the renaming but said publicly that while he would not be able to read the paper into the record, he would distribute copies of the brief to the members.

Did the members have enough time to read the brief, though? Of course not. The vote was imminent.

Another ally on the board was staff representative Robynn Pease. Unfortunately, however, Smith, Pease and Yanarella were decidedly in the minority.

The board quickly approved the motion to cries of “no!” from the student section.

The students and their allies in the viewing section stood all at once and began to walk out of the meeting in protest when something interesting happened.

Those against the renaming (who comprised about 90 percent of non-board members present) stirred indignantly to life.

Jeers and epithets were hurled at the board members, who sat in stunned silence at their table. Several of the board members began to get up and leave, one of them stopping to whisper in the ear of a security officer who stood off to the side.

Yet the outburst quickly congealed and several leading voices emerged from among the angry students. These students began to speak to the board just as they had earlier requested to do, speaking passionately and feverishly about the consequences of the vote they had just cast.

The only board member who seemed at all interested in hearing what these students had to say was Robynn Pease, who quietly and respectfully sat at her place at the end of the table and listened to the impassioned cries of injustice from the students.

But it was too late. Other board members had deemed the students to be, in the words of the Kernel, too “disruptive” to remain in the room. Police were dispatched to clear the room and dissent had officially been quashed.

The board had used tried and true dissent-quashing tactics: announce the meeting only a few days in advance, don’t allow opponents to publicly speak at the meeting, call a quick vote, and when met with dissent, have the police eject the dissenters from the room.

The board followed an age-old template they know well, and they performed brilliantly.

But this issue will not lie dormant. Hopefully for our campus, the passionate voices of dissent I and others heard in the board room Tuesday will continue to raise their voices and, barring that, engage in other activities to express their opposition to the board’s decision.

At the end of the day, trying to understand the board’s reasoning is all an exercise in futility not even worth attempting. The simple lesson we have learned, students, faculty and staff, is that money speaks louder than our voices.

Is this what democracy looks like?