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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.
Nobody has lived at 610 North Buchanan Boulevard in Durham, North Carolina since March 2006, when police began investigating charges that members of the Duke University lacrosse team had raped a woman there.
Three years later, the criminal charges against the players have long since been dropped, but the house remains padlocked and vacant. Duke owns the building, and wants to tear it down, but lawyers for members of the team are insisting that it be preserved as evidence in a possible lawsuit.
The Duke Chronicle, the university’s student newspaper, has the story.
Last year fifty students at Atlanta’s Spelman College were forced to drop out because of financial hardship, and with the nation’s economy reeling, prospects for 2009 are looking considerably more grim.
And so, an effort to keep the student body together, the student government of the nation’s first historically black college for women has created an emergency scholarship fund.
The new fund builds on projects the student government undertook last semester, when it created a free textbook program for students in need and persuaded Aramark, the college’s dining services provider, to provide meal plan subsidies to selected undergraduates.
The student government has provided $10,000 in seed money for the new emergency scholarships, and is connecting current students with potential donors in a letter-writing campaign to raise more.
A group of students presented a University of Florida administrator with a petition Wednesday protesting the disproportionate impact of recent university layoffs on women and people of color.
According to the group, women represent 34% of full-time UF faculty, but 61% of those fired as a result of recent budget cuts. Among people of color, the figures were 25% and 54%, respectively.
Update: Here’s an article from the Gainesville Sun about other recent student organizing against UF budget cuts.
studentactivism.net 
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