Brown is the crazy college of the Ivy League–although the other seven Ivies usually aren't far behind.
But this report from Campus Reform takes the crazy cake:
Brown University's student body president will be hand-delivering menstrual products to all nonresidential bathrooms on campus, including men’s rooms, with the help of 20 other students.
Viet Nguyen, President of the Undergraduate Council of Students, announced the initiative in a campus-wide email Tuesday, saying he wants to communicate the message that not all people who menstruate are women, according to Newsweek.
"Not all people who menstruate are women"? Ummm.
“We wanted to set a tone of trans-inclusivity, and not forget that they’re an important part of the population,” he says.
Oh, political correctness.
Let's see: Brown has 6,320 undergraduates. Since transgenders are estimated to make up .2 to .3 percent of the U.S. population, and the ratio of transwomen to transmen is about 3:1, that means that, statistically speaking, a grand total of 4.7 Brown students will be availing themselves of 15-20 campus men's rooms' worth of menstrual products. (Brown appears to have 30-40 nonresidential restrooms in toto.)
That's a lot of free time-of-the month stuff!. So I've got some great advice for those 4.7 transmen on how to work your way through Brown: The state of Rhode Island, though tiny, has no fewer than 13 two- and four-year institutions of higher learning. They're all co-ed, as far as I know, and as far as I know, none except Brown has instituted a freebie tampon program courtesy of its student body president. So–be entrepreneurial. Bet those cisgender women at the Rhode Island School of Design would love to acquire menstrual products at half-price delivered right to their dorm rooms. So go for it, 4.7!
According to Nguyen, the that-time freebies will come out of the undergraduate finance-board budget, not Brown's general university budget:
“There’s been a lot of conversation about why pads and tampons are a necessity, not a luxury, but not a lot of action. We wanted to take it into our own hands,” Nguyen explains in the email, observing that “low-income students struggle with having the necessary funding for food, let alone tampons.”
Since tuition alone at Brown costs $50,224, presumably the university can afford to dish out monthly products for nothing–although why not just lower that tuition instead?
But that would be asking too much in the way of sanity at Brown. After all, it's the crazy college.