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Linda Sue Warner, the president of Haskell Indian Nation University, isn’t having a good year.
Warner, who has served as president of HINU since 2007, took criticism in February for a bizarre episode in which she forced a student critic of her administration to graduate early. At the time, Warner was summoned to Washington DC for an emergency meeting with university trustees and government officials.
Warner kept her job after that incident, but it wasn’t long before she was in the spotlight again.
As part of a campaign to improve and expand the campus, Warner sought to raise tuition from $215 a semester to $1000. HINU is, however, the only four-year college for Native American students that is operated by the federal government, and it has a long tradition of free or nearly-free education. Warner’s plans to nearly quintuple fees sparked a huge campus backlash, and the university’s board of regents called for her to be fired.
That hasn’t happened … yet.
At the beginning of the fall semester, Warner was told by her bosses at the Bureau of Indian Education that she would not be returning to HINU this year. Instead, she would be sent to the Southwestern Indian Polytechnic Institute, a two-year college in New Mexico, to help them with their accreditation process. HINU would have an interim president while she was away.
According to news reports, Warner has been forbidden to talk to the press.
As of now, Warner is slated to return to HINU in January. We’ll keep an eye on the story and let you know whether that happens.
In the meantime, be sure to check out our coverage of that involuntary early graduation story from the spring. It’s a weird one.
Students at California State University Fresno staged a walkout and teach-in on Wednesday, protesting the massive fee increases and budget cuts that are underway at California’s public universities.
An estimated four hundred Fresno State students participated in the walkout, which built steam over the course of the morning and included a march around campus.
At two o’clock that afternoon, one hundred students climbed the stairs to the fourth floor of the campus library, which houses the offices of Fresno State president John D. Welty.
The students sat in outside his suite for two hours before Welty arrived, and secured an agreement that Welty will participate in a public meeting one week from Tuesday to discuss students’ demands.
This was the fifth sit-in of the fall semester at a California public university, following actions at UCLA and Berkeley, and two at UC Santa Cruz. This weekend, students from across California will gather at Berkeley for a statewide activist conference on the budget crisis.
studentactivism.net 
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