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A coalition of student groups at New York City’s Brooklyn College is calling a class walkout at 3 pm on Wednesday, April 29.
The walkout is in opposition to a planned $600 tuition hike at CUNY. As the protest organizers put it, “80% of the tuition hike goes to fill a gap in the state’s budget,” making the hike a “tax for students, the very people to whom a $600 increase makes a huge difference!”
You can find out more about the walkout at its Facebook Event page.
May 2 update: Photos!
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.
A dispute over a controversial issue of a conservative student newspaper is boiling over at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.
The March-April issue of The Minuteman, a right-wing UMass student publication, contained both an investigative article on the budget of a campus group called Student Bridges and an insipid humor piece that ridiculed the appearance of one of that group’s leaders.
The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education has distributed a video in which, it claims, “hundreds of copies of The Minuteman are stolen out of the hands of a student intending to distribute the paper.” The student holding the video does not appear to resist or object when other students take copies of the paper from him, however, and in one of the few clear pieces of audio in the footage a conservative student is heard saying, with amusement, “This is amazing. This is amazing footage, I’ve gotta say.”
Subsequent to that videotaped confrontation, the UMass student government association passed a resolution calling upon the Silent Majority, publishers of The Minuteman, to apologize for what it characterized as “slanderous defamation of character,” and raising the possibility of the suspension of the group’s charter if it didn’t comply.
At the next week’s meeting of the SGA, this past Wednesday, a member of the student government was ejected in the wake of a dispute over whether a second resolution, rescinding the first, could be placed on the agenda.
This story doesn’t look like it’s done yet. Check back for more in the days to come.
Last week a campus political party at the University of Maryland College Park defied their administration and some state legislators and screened about half an hour’s worth of a hardcore porn movie as part of a free-speech forum.
So what’s happened since?
Well, legislators backed off of their threat to immediately axe UMD’s state funding over the screening, but they’re planning to revisit the issue in the fall. The state legislature directed the university to establish a policy on porn on campus before September 1, and at their Friday meeting the university’s regents told the UMD chancellor to present them with a set of recommendations for such a policy by summer.
In other news, the UMD College Park president, uninterested in picking any new fights with right-wing politicians, has overriden a vote of the university senate to drop the opening prayer from the university’s commencement ceremonies. The senate had voted 32-14 to abandon the prayer, with all of the senate’s student members voting with the majority.
The UMD College Park Student Power Party, the campus activists who staged the porn-screening-slash-free-speech-forum, have apparently seen all their candidates go down to defeat in the student government’s executive board elections. Election results aren’t official yet, though, as one of the other slates has charges of campaign violations pending.
Finally, the university’s student government voted unanimously on Thursday to oppose UMD’s contract with apparel-maker Russell Athletic. More than two dozen colleges and universities have dumped RA since the beginning of the year, in response to findings of labor violations at one of RA’s Honduras factories.
The students of the University of Arkansas voted this week to urge the U of A to adopt “sanctions for the possession and use of marijuana … no greater than those imposed by the University for the possession and use of alcohol.”
The university’s dean of students inserted himself into the referendum debate a week ago, sending a mass email to students arguing that “individuals choosing to possess and/or use marijuana merit different educational sanctions from those who violate the alcohol policy.” All of the candidates running for student government president and vice president endorsed the referendum, however, and it passed by a two-to-one margin.
Update: These referenda have been put on the ballot by NORML chapters at a bunch of campuses — one passed at Purdue just last week.
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