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Since their founding in the 19th century, California’s public colleges and universities have been tuition free for in-state students. For the last several decades, however, “tuition free” has been a hoax.
Over the course of the 20th century legislators and administrators imposed more and more new fees on California’s students, and in the 1960s and after those fees grew to match the tuition charged at other states’ universities. No politician wanted to be responsible for “ending free tuition” in the state, though, so today students pay nearly $4500 a semester in fees — including a $3130 “Educational Fee” — instead.
This kind of political cowardice is usually just annoying, but every once in a while it actually causes measurable harm to students, and right now is one of those times.
Congress passed a new GI Bill earlier this spring that pays the tuition of US veterans. The bill covers the full cost of tuition and fees at public institutions, and uses public tuition and fee rates to determine reimbursement rates for privates.
And yes, the tuition and fee rates are calculated separately.
So if you’re a California veteran and you get accepted to Stanford, the GI Bill will cover none of your $24,020 tuition. It will, however, cover all of your $84 student government fee. (In fact, it’ll cover up to $6,586.54 in fees every semester, far more than Stanford charges any student.)
There’s an effort underway to change the law, but no real movement yet.
When you enter the main library at the University of Rhode Island, you pass between two inscriptions carved in black granite.
One is from Thomas Jefferson: “Enlighten the people … and tyranny and oppressions of body and mind will vanish like spirits at the dawn of day.”
The other is from Malcolm X: “My alma mater was books, a good library … I could spend the rest of my life reading, just satisfying my curiosity.”
The quotes inscribed on the library were chosen from among student submissions, and according to the artist who prepared them, it was not until after the stones carved that it became known that the Malcolm quote was incomplete. Here is the quote as it appears in his autobiography:
My alma mater was books, a good library. Every time I catch a plane, I have with me a book I want to read — and that’s a lot of books these days. If I weren’t out here every day battling the white man, I could spend the rest of my life reading, just satisfying my curiosity — because you can’t hardy mention anything I’m not curious about.
–Malcolm X.
The unveiling of the bowdlerized quote in the fall of 1992 sparked protest from students of color on the RIU campus, helping to provoke a sit-in that won the creation of a major in African and African-American studies at the university.
Happy Birthday, Malcolm.
The second of three students charged in a computer-hacking case at Florida A&M University has been sentenced to prison.
As Student Activism noted in March, Lawrence Secrease, Christopher Jacquette, and Marcus Barrington were accused of breaking into FAMU computers to raise students’ grades and change their residency records to allow them to pay in-state tuition rates. Seacrease and Jacquette pled guilty and testified against Barrington, who was tried and convicted.
Seacrease was sentenced to twenty-two months in prison yesterday, and Jacquette received the same sentence several weeks ago. Barrington faces sentencing next month, and could receive a term of thirty years.
The University of Tennessee has granted a football scholarship to a student who participated in the brutal rape of his cousin at the age of 13.
(I’m putting this story behind a cut, as it contains details of the crime.)
A former medical student is claiming that he was suspended from the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey for describing himself as a “white, African, American.”
Paulo Serodio is of European descent, was born in Mozambique, and is a citizen of the United States, so each of the components of his self-identification is literally accurate, but he says that students and staff at the university objected to it.
Serodio claims that he was harassed and assaulted after making the comments, and his lawyer told the Associated Press that “directly” as a result of the comments he was suspended from the school. Serodio is now suing.
This story is already blowing up in the right-wing blogosphere, for obvious reasons, but as far as I can tell the AP article is the only source on it so far, and I have to say it doesn’t feel complete to me.
We don’t have the whole story on this yet, and I bet you ten bucks that the full version is going to be more interesting than the one we have now.
1 pm update: I’ve found a copy of the complaint. More soon.
studentactivism.net 
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