“You can pay for a big a– mansion, but you can’t pay for an AC unit in our dorms,” third-year student Rigoberto Sanchez Mejia said in an interview with The UCSD Guardian, criticizing Chancellor Pradeep Khosla over university spending priorities during a record-breaking heat wave.
Students were left to suffer in their dorms after a historic heat wave hit San Diego last week from Oct. 2 to Oct. 8. According to UC San Diego’s Housing Dining Hospitality, all campus dorms and housing units do not have air conditioning due to La Jolla’s mild weather and the university’s proximity to ocean breezes. Yet as climate change continues to accelerate, temperate coastal climates are no longer enough to protect uncooled dorms from rising temperatures.
Temperatures at peak moments exceeded mid-90 degrees, leaving students to search for creative measures to fight the heat. This most recent heat wave in October followed a broader pattern San Diego County has witnessed over the past few months. In early September, a heat advisory was sent to all of San Diego County’s climate zones, including the coasts, inland valleys, deserts and mountains. Escondido reached a record-breaking high temperature of 112 degrees, while in El Cajon temperatures climbed to an extreme temperature of 108 degrees…