Looking to their favorite faculty member, adjunct professor and soon to be homeless Elizabeth Emula, for guidance, Stanford students Alexa Ante ’19 and William Woolf ’20 decided last week to begin circulating a petition for RD&E to replace the unreliable soft serve machines in Wilbur Dining.
“Working ice cream machines are a necessary human comfort and basic right,” Woolf says of the project’s mission, “And no one knows this better than our favorite professor, Elizabeth Emula, a sociology professor who has fallen victim to the skyrocketing rent prices of the Palo Alto area and has no affordable alternative to turn to besides commuting hours to work every day from out of town.” Emula, who is more than two months late for rent due to illegal contract clauses inserted by her landlord, is known around campus for providing an empathetic ear to students.
Ante says she has already had several productive meetings with Emula to discuss “writing an open letter of protest to the university in an effort to ameliorate the living conditions of students.” Many other students they have spoken with about the issue agree that an institution with a $22.4 billion endowment should be responsible for ensuring the basic necessities, such as efficiently operating frozen confection dispensers, for its populace. Woolf adds that, “for a university that vows to be committed to the health and wellbeing of its community, this is quite frankly a despicable violation of that promise.”
