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The Arizona Students’ Association and the Associated Students of the University of Arizona have put up a powerful slideshow on the University of Arizona’s proposed tuition increase:
The idea behind the slideshow is simple: Let students speak directly to the increase would change their lives. Real students, real impact.
The statements speak to a wide variety of effects — “a third job,” “my little brother’s ability to come here,” “a plane ticket to visit my dad.” Each tells a personal story, and each gives that story a human face.
It’s a great, powerful statement. Go look.
And if you’re running an anti-tuition campaign of your own, maybe you should bring a camera and a whiteboard (or a pad and sharpie) to your next rally.
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 University of Vermont student activists who occupied their university’s administration building last week have issued a revised list of demands.
When the activists of Students Stand Up occupied the UVM admin building on Wednesday, they presented the president with thirteen demands, each of which related to budgetary and labor issues. In a news release last night, however, they replaced those thirteen demands with just four.
They call those four demands “the core concerns that are the base of our campaign and our new understanding of what is feasible.”
The first two demands on the new list are substantively the same as the first two on the old list: SSU wants UVM to reverse all dismissals and non-reappointments that it has announced, and cancel all plans for new layoffs. The third new demand is in essence the same as the eleventh from the original list — SSU wants “a democratic process by which students, staff, and faculty have decisive roles in decisions regarding the budget.”
(We’ll get back to that third demand in a subsequent post. It’s a big one, and an important one.)
The fourth demand is a revised version of the eighth demand on the old list — SSU is calling for administrative compensation at UVM to be cut, in order to “save as many positions as possible.” Instead of firing faculty and staff, in other words, make administrators take a pay cut.
There’s a fifth demand in their new statement, though it’s not included in the numbered list. They want UVM President Daniel Fogel to resign. By calling in police to arrest demonstrators last Wednesday instead of talking with them in good faith, they say, Fogel acted in a “disturbing and callous” way. Because of that lack of respect for dialogue and university community, they say, “we are issuing a call for his immediate resignation.”
For updates on Students Stand Up’s next moves, check out their Twitter feed. Also very much worth reading is this SSU member’s dissection of a budget memo released by UVM’s vice president on Friday.
The Brecht Forum in New York is hosting a panel tomorrow afternoon called “Whose Schools/Our Schools: A Strategic Round Table on the NYC Student Movement.”
The forum will be held tomorrow at 4 pm in the West Village, and will feature student activists from CUNY, NYU, and the New School.
Here’s the description and panel lineup, via The Young Vote:
Thirty-one student supporters of local activist group Students Stand Up (Twitter feed) were arrested during protests against budget cuts at the University of Vermont yesterday.
At three o’clock yesterday a group of about a hundred UVM students staged a sit-in at the offices of university president Dan Fogel. Seven of those students sat in inside Fogel’s suite, and were arrested in the afternoon, while the rest of the students, protesting immediately outside the presidential offices, were allowed to remain for a time.
According to the Burlington Free Press, the students’ list of thirteen demands included “revoking recent reductions in faculty, capping tuition increases at the rate of inflation and recovering all the bonuses paid to administrators in 2008 and 2009.”
At 9:30 in the evening the university shut the building to incoming students. It was announced that the building would close at ten o’clock, and that students who remained after closing would be subject to arrest. About half the sixty students then occupying the building left before arrests began, but at least twenty-five — including at least one who had been arrested earlier in the day — were booked on trespassing charges.
By the time police began making arrests, several hundred students had gathered outside the building in support of the sit-in. All but one of the protesters were released immediately after being booked.
A rally at the university’s library is planned for noon today. I’ll update this post as news comes in.
April 24 morning update: About a hundred students attended the noon rally, where students called for UVM president Dan Fogel’s resignation. Plans for more actions are in the works. Also, Students Stand Up has a Facebook group.
studentactivism.net 
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