CHICAGO — The NFL Draft starts Thursday night in Chicago and is being held at the Roosevelt Auditorium Theatre at Roosevelt University.
A student group known as RISE plans to protest the draft in a quest for “social justice.”
“Instead of fulfilling its social justice mission to educate working class students, students of color students (sic), and non traditional students, Roosevelt University is using scarce resources to subsidize NFL profits by hosting its draft free of charge,” second year student Lupita Carrasquillo said in a statement.
The group’s Facebook page has just over 100 members who say they plan on attending.
From the group’s Facebook page: Over the last year RU students have been pushing back on the economic injustices inflicted on our student body. In recent history students, staff, and faculty have been witness to the degradation of the social justice mission of our university, raising tuition, freezing salaries of faculty, pushing for a traditional university that ignores the very students the university was created for, purging students who can’t afford the higher tuition, while president Middleton is leaving with 1.8 MILLION dollars. On top of all of this Roosevelt’s Auditorium theater and the parks surrounding our campus are being used to host the NFL draft during our finals week, pushing forward the graduation ceremony.
The administration has quieted these concerns without addressing them. Enough is enough — now is our time to tell the world that we as students come before the greed of both our University and our city.
