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Two hundred students at Mississippi’s Delta State University walked out of classes yesterday morning to rally against planned budget cuts at the state’s small public colleges. Among those protesting were DSU’s Statesman and “Fighting Okra” mascots, both in full costume.
Mississippi’s public higher education trustees have announced plans to divert funding from several smaller institutions to the flagship University of Mississippi. Ole Miss will receive nearly $2 million in additional funding next year, while DSU stands to lose $175,000. “They are taking money away from a school that produces teachers and nurses,” undergraduate Samantha Styers said, “and giving it a school that produces lawyers and engineers.”
The incoming chair of the state’s College Board said the entire system is “grossly underfunded, and that’s making us have to make very painful choices.”
Nathan Duff, editor of DSU’s Daily Statesman and an organizer of the walkout, said that the protests were not over: “we’re going to keep the pressure on.”
The College Board is slated to consider tuition increases at its next meeting in May.
University of Illinois junior Frank Calabrese, 20, lost his campaign for student body president earlier this month. So now he’s running for the Illinois House of Representatives.
Illinois House District 103 includes the campus of the University of Illinois at Urbana, and nearly half its constituents are UI students. The district has been represented by Democrat Naomi Jakobsson since 2002, and Calabrese is running as the nominee of the Republican party.
The UI student body president is selected by the campus student senate. Calabrese, a three-term student senator, placed last in a three-way race for the presidency in an April 3 election.
The Wichita State University Sunflower has been told that its 2008-09 student government funding will not be disbursed until a review of the newspaper’s activities has been completed.
The funds in question are from student activity fees, which amount to approximately half the paper’s total budget. The review, however, seems to have been initiated at least in part by university administrators rather than students.
Budgets for student organizations at WSU are set by a Student Fees Committee composed of five students and two administrators. The student members are appointed by student government, but the committee is chaired by Ron Kopita, the university’s vice president for campus life and university relations. Sunflower editor-in-chief Todd Vogts says Kopita questioned Sunflower staffers about the newspaper’s operations and editorial content in mid-March, two weeks before the Student Fee Committee recommended a formal investigation of the paper.
The task force that will be reviewing the newspaper’s operations will be appointed by Kopita, not the student government, according to a memorandum that the Sunflower received from Dean of Students Cheryl Adams.
The Sunflower‘s current fiscal year ends in October. Kopita has not guaranteed that the task force’s work will be completed by then.
Update: The Sunflower task force is the subject of an article in the Wichita Eagle.
There’s talk at the University of South Florida about merging or downgrading the school’s Women’s Studies Department, Africana Studies Department, and the Institute for the Study of Latin America and the Caribbean. This blog is trying to stop it.
According to the blog, the USF Women’s Studies Department has been around for 35 years, and is “the only free-standing department of Women’s Studies in the State of Florida.”
The Columbia University takeover of 1968 began forty years ago this week. The anniversary has been commemorated in the pages of the New York Times and the Washington Post, as well as on Democracy Now.
studentactivism.net 
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