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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.
Britain’s Conservative Party, also known as the Tories, seem likely to sweep into power in Britain next spring, and today a London newspaper is reporting that they may bring with them a doubling of tuition fees for British university students.
Undergraduate fees in Britain are currently capped at £3,225 a year, about $5,100, but the Tories’ chief higher education official was quoted this morning as saying that he’s open to raising that cap to as much as £7,000 — more than $11,000. Such an increase would dwarf even the massive hikes that are currently being proposed in the University of California system here in the United States.
The center-left Labour Party has led Britain’s government since 1997, but recent polling has shown a strong and relatively stable lead for the Conservatives. By law, new parliamentary elections must be held by June of next year.
Here’s a story with a happy ending.
Two weeks ago, Jacob Miller, a graduate student at the University of Arizona, was arrested on campus. His crime? Chalking.
Miller, along with a number of other students, had been writing slogans and drawings on the university’s sidewalks in chalk to promote a rally protesting the commercialization of higher education. A university employee called the police, and Miller was arrested for criminal damage and disturbing an educational institution.
The two charges were each class one misdemeanors, and carried a combined maximum penalty of a year in prison and $5,000 in fines. Miller had been identified through video surveillance footage.
The arrest sparked a huge uproar on campus. The following weekend a group of students began buying sidewalk chalk in bulk and handing it out by the bucketful on campus. Early on Monday morning a Poli Sci major named Evan Lisull was was arrested for writing the slogans “Chalk is Speech” and “Freedom of Expression” on campus sidewalks.
Lisull’s arrest seemed likely to escalate the situation further, but instead it brought the university to its senses. On Monday afternoon UA president Robert Shelton instructed campus police to drop all charges against the two students, and declared that the university would no longer treat chalking as a criminal matter.
UA said at the time that it would in the future handle chalking complaints “as possible Code of Conduct violations through the Dean of Students Office,” but soon it was in full retreat, announcing this week that chalkers would not face disciplinary consequences of any kind.
Chalk one up for … well, you know.
As many as ten thousand students, faculty, and staff of the University of California participated in public protests against the defunding of the university yesterday, and untold thousands more walked out of classes, held teach-ins, and walked picket lines. Students at two campuses occupied university buildings, and observers of the Berkeley rally said it was that school’s biggest protest in a generation.
This was big.
And it was even more impressive because yesterday was the first day of classes for the year at every UC campus except for Berkeley and Merced. At UC’s other eight universities, organizers brought hundreds, even thousands, of people into the streets and quads despite the lack of time and facilities for organizing in advance.
Yesterday, then, was just the beginning. UCLA protesters won a commitment from their chancellor to hold a public forum on the budget crisis on October 6, and they’re already organizing to keep the pressure up over the next twelve days. UC Santa Barbara has scheduled a series of teach-ins for October 11. In the coming weeks and months, activists will be building on what was achieved yesterday, growing the movement that will restore the University of California’s health, strength, and accessibility.
Over the course of this afternoon, I’ll be posting detailed reports on yesterday’s events at each of UC’s ten campuses — Berkeley, Davis, Irvine, Los Angeles (UCLA), Merced, Riverside, San Diego (UCSD), San Francisco (UCSF), Santa Barbara (UCSB), and Santa Cruz (UCSB). Check back in to get the whole story!
Note: Josh from Santa Cruz (@alittlefishy on Twitter) has put together the best roundup I’ve seen of media coverage of the UC walkout. The reports below rely heavily on the sources he compiled.
Berkeley
Five thousand was the official police estimate of the size of the crowd, and UC sources called it the largest Berkeley rally in decades. After two hours of speeches and chants, the protest went mobile, streaming off the campus and shutting down traffic for several blocks. A mass meeting later drew hundreds of participants, who voted to meet again next Wednesday to plan strategy for a possible statewide conference October 24.
Davis
A crowd that the UC Davis student newspaper said numbered in the thousands rallied on the campus quad, then staged an impromptu march to — and into — the Mrak administration building. Hundreds of sign-toting protesters occupied the public areas of the building briefly before, as grad student @AMYCHAMP put it on Twitter, deciding “to keep it peaceful, and take it outside.”
Irvine
Morning and evening teach-ins bracketed the day at Irvine, where a crowd estimated at about five hundred attended the noon rally. One source said that 150 Irvine faculty walked out of their classes.
UCLA
The noon rally at Bruin Plaza drew about seven hundred participants, and like those at Berkeley and Davis, it eventually turned into a march. Police blocked protesters when they arrived at the front entrance of Murphy Hall, the site of UCLA’s administrative offices, but a group of about sixty students were able to find alternate routes inside and make their way to the doors to the chancellor’s offices, where they staged a sit-in.
UCLA’s chancellor was not in the building at the time, but a campus official met with sit-in leaders and agreed to their two demands — that he set up a meeting with representatives of the university’s undergrads, grad students, faculty and staff, and that he schedule a town-hall campus forum on the budget crisis. The sit-in ended without any arrests or university judicial action.
Merced
Merced is the newest UC campus — it’s just four years old — and one of the smallest. Their rally was the smallest as well, but the walkout had significant participation, and students and faculty conducted flyering and tabling during the day as well.
Riverside
Hundreds of students participated in the noon rally, with more attending teach-ins before and after.
San Diego
Teach-ins were held on Wednesday and Thursday, and a two-hour rally drew hundreds of participants. At the end of the rally, some protesters marched into classes to urge students and faculty to join the walkout.
A campus-wide planning meeting for future organizing is scheduled for Wednesday.
San Francisco
Hundreds attended a rally at the UCSF Medical Center, where State Senator Leland Yee addressed the crowd. Students at San Francisco State and the City College of San Francisco also held demonstrations in support of the UC walkout.
Santa Barbara
There was a full day of walkout events at UCSB, where more than 125 faculty members signed the walkout pledge. Four hundred university community members attended the noon rally.
There will be a budget teach-in at Santa Barbara on October 14 from 3 pm to midnight.
Santa Cruz
Two rallies were held — one at noon and the second at 3:30 pm. The first drew hundreds of participants, and the second led to a building takeover that (as of Tuesday morning, five days after the walkout) is still ongoing. More on that in a new post soon.
studentactivism.net 
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