UNIVERSITY CHANCELLOR INSTALLS SECRET ESCAPE HATCH

Nicholas Dirks, the chancellor at University of California Berkeley has installed a $9,000 escape hatch in a hallway outside his office so he can get the hell out if potential student protesters descend on the administration building. The emergency exit, built late last month, was ordered in response to an April 2015 protest during which students stormed the chancellor’s suite in California Hall and staged a sit-in outside his office. The new door did not sit well with some students at the public university. “There has to be other ways to handle student concerns and protests than simply building ways to avoid them,” student Senator-elect Chris Yamas says. “The chancellor seems elitist and out of touch and inaccessible to the students.”
* He wouldn’t be saying that if the chancellor had built an escape rocket. He’d be saying, “Cool!”
* The chancellor got the idea for the secret escape door from workers at the Post Office windows. “I have to go check in the back. I’ll be back in a second.”
* $9,000? Does it include an underground monorail to the parking lot?
* Umm, maybe we should go over the concept of “secret” again.
* Now the protesters will storm the place THROUGH the escape hatch.
* Wait – maybe it’s a decoy escape hatch!
* The chancellor seems elitist? No, an elitist would have put in a survival bunker below the building.
* The chancellor may not be elitist but he does seem a little paranoid.
* Let’s just say he wouldn’t have made that “Profiles in Courage” book.