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10:20 pm: Students at the University of Vermont (UVM) are sitting in at the university president’s office, protesting budget cuts. Some arrests were made earlier today, more possible at any time.
I’m still getting up to speed with this story, and following it primarily on Twitter. Check out the @studentactivism feed for updates.
10:50 pm update: Multiple reports on Twitter suggest mass arrests going on at the sit-in. I’m not going to try to cover this minute-by-minute, since info is so sketchy right now. I’ll post again tonight if I get anything major and unambiguous, though, and I’ll have a full write-up in the morning.
Midnight update: The building has been cleared, with about 30 students arrested. One report says all but one were processed and released. Hundreds of students were outside the building supporting the arrested protesters as they were let go. A rally is planned at the university library tomorrow at noon.
10:00 am update: The morning follow-up post is up.
On April 22, 1969, hundreds of black and Latino students at New York’s City College took over seventeen campus buildings demanding reforms in the university’s treatment of students and faculty of color.
They shut down the university for two weeks, and their protests — which continued throughout the spring — led directly to the establishment of open admissions at the City University of New York a year later.
Open admissions nearly doubled the size of CUNY, and transformed the university forever. (It also helped open the door to the implementation of tuition in the system for the first time six years later.)
Today, students at City College will mark the anniversary with a 2 o’clock walkout in protest of budget cuts and tuition increases.
The student government at the University of Florida is in a bind.
The university is saying that two student services programs — the Multicultural and Diversity Affairs program and the Center for Leadership and Service — are may be eliminated in the upcoming academic year. To save them, some students are proposing that students foot the bill with an increase to the campus Activity Fee.
MDA houses UF’s Institute of Black Culture and Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender (LGBT) Affairs, while CLS supports volunteering and student leadership development programs on campus.
University administrators are always eager to find ways to dump student affairs expenses out of their operating budget and into student fee-based funding mechanisms, and student governments across the country have learned to be wary of such proposals.
But the threat to shut down these programs may not be an empty one. The university is facing a possible a ten percent cut in its Student Affairs budget for the coming year, and a UF administrator says MDA and CLS, which cost a combined $508,000 annually, are the only budget lines in Student Affairs that aren’t mandated by state law.
Student governments have to tread carefully in these situations. It can be very difficult to separate fact from fiction in administrators’ claims. Even when the threat to a program is real, a short-term crisis often leads to a permanent shift in revenue streams.
We’re going to be seeing a lot more of these dilemmas in the months and years to come. How student governments respond to them will be a major test of their ability to advocate effectively for students’ interests.
San Jose State University had to turn away more than four thousand qualified applicants this spring. So now, in an effort to make more room for newcomers next year, it’s looking to cull its returning roster.
Fifteen percent of SJSU’s ten thousand seniors have held senior status for at least three years, and three hundred of them have accumulated 150 credits or more. Thirty-five of those have been undergrads at the school for a decade or longer, and two have been there for fifteen years — each of them earning more than 360 credits.
A bachelor of arts degree at SJSU requires only 120.
There’s not much SJSU can do to force these students to graduate, though it does intend to give them a nudge. Students with 120% or more of the credits they need to graduate will be required to sit for a session of “intrusive advising” with a dean, in which they will be shown — and urged to do — what it takes to finish and leave.
Other colleges are taking different approaches to the problem. California State East Bay is cutting off financial aid for third-year seniors. Baylor University charges full-time tuition to all students, and UNC hikes tuition once you hit 140 total credits.
A federal court has found that a student who erased her tuition bills by filing bankruptcy has a right to force her alma mater to provide her with transcripts.
Stefanie Kim Kuehn earned a Master’s degree from Cardinal Stritch University in Milwaukee, but she graduated owing $6000 in tuition and fees. She later declared bankruptcy, discharging that debt, but the university refused to give her her transcripts.
A judge ruled that the university, having allowed Kuehn to graduate, could not now withhold transcripts in the face of a bankruptcy filing. That ruling was upheld at the federal circuit court level in 2007, and at the appellate level yesterday.
The court’s ruling provides little comfort for other broke students, though — the judges ruled that CSU would have been within their rights to delay granting Kuehn’s degree until she paid her bills.
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