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The area and time I grew up in had zero non-English classes until high school! Literally just skipping the most beneficial periods of language learning. It was only required that we take 1 year of a foreign language to graduate, and that’s not really enough time to be proficient (or it wasn’t the way we were taught, anyway).
I’ve been casually learning Spanish for the past few years, and doing it on your own as an adult without paying for courses is hard, especially if your native language is in a different language family. I can definitely understand why people who emerge from the school system monolingual just stay that way.
Well, you wouldn’t know it from the article, but the protestors had a specific goal: get the university to divest its investments in Intel due to their close ties to Israel. The threat of it being fucking expensive and disruptive if they don’t do that is one of many possible tactics they had available.
Whether or not that’s a good idea or an effective one is a completely different discussion, but they’re not doing it because they hate books. They’re doing it because the books cost a lot to replace and it’s very disruptive to business as usual.
If it makes you feel any better, in sections where current information changes rapidly (law, technology, medicine, etc) these books were destined to be discarded and destroyed within a few years anyway. Universities throw away or recycle a ton of books every year, often because literally nobody wants them.
It’s not what I would have chosen to do, but I also can’t really fault teenagers and young adults being a little over the top about an ongoing genocide that in their view their university is indirectly financially benefiting from.