Use OCCUPY LA

Go to OCCUPY LOUISIANA for updated info on the student struggle against the destruction of our universities.

This blog will remain up as an archive, there is lots of useful information on here as far as what cuts have happened so far.

RESIST // STRIKE // OCCUPY

Exploitation Makes Us Lose Our Appetites

This Friday, nearly 100 Tulane students are planning an “Eat-In” in their cafeteria as a peaceful act of civil disobedience to protest their food service contractor Sodexo's behavior on campus.

Tulane and Loyola university cafeteria workers have been standing up for better working conditions for months—just like thousands of other Sodexo workers across the country but have faced retaliation from Sodexo.

In New Orleans, workers earn as little as $8.00 an hour without access to affordable health insurance. Due to such low wages, some workers are forced to turn to government assistance for housing, food, and health care.

Check out www.CleanUpSodexo.org for more details on nationwide activity and global support.

Previous New Orleans Activity includes:
- City Council hearing on 4/13 where Sodexo workers testified to protest the pattern of illegal behavior on the university campuses. Times-Picayune article:http://www.nola.com/politics/index.ssf/2010/04/labor_concerns_presented_to_ci.html

- Press Conference on the steps of City Hall releasing a report: “Hardship in the Big Easy: How Sodexo’s Practices Leave New Orleans Workers in Poverty” Download here:http://cleanupsodexo.org/2010/04/in-new-orleans-workers-testify-before-ci.php

- Rally and march through both Loyola and Tulane universities campuses on 4/15. http://thehullabaloo.com/2010/04/16/sodexo-protests-reach-city-hall/

- Delegation to Tulane Univ. President Scott Cowan led by well-known author Barbara Ehrenreich. Students delivered a petition with 1,000+ signatures and more than 100+ faculty submitted their own petition in support: http://thehullabaloo.com/2010/03/26/campus-rally-supports-unionization/ and http://thehullabaloo.com/2010/03/26/ehrenreich-addresses-optimisim/

* * * * * * * * * *
Anthony Thomas, a Sodexo worker at Tulane University who spoke at City Hall said, “After 5 years I received two raises—one for 24 cents, the other for 12 cents—and now I make $8.12 an hour which makes it hard even to pay my bills. Just because my coworkers and I are trying to create better jobs for everyone, Sodexo has threatened and illegally questioned my coworkers and that isn’t right.”
By the way, $8.12/hr is $324 for a 40 hour work week...before taxes.
• 23.8%: Percentage of individuals in New Orleans below the poverty line
• 13.2%: Percentage of individuals nationally below the poverty line
• $22,050: Federal poverty line for a family of four
• $16,640: Annual earnings of a Sodexo worker in New Orleans making $8.00 an hour

UNO Students Protest Jindal at GOP conference

UNO students and over 250 others took the streets on Friday in downtown to protest Jindal's cuts to UNO, as well as other policies that are harming our future, like the closing of Charity Hospital, while he was in town for the Southern Republican Leadership Conference.
The organizers of the protest did a great job. Keep up the pressure.

Gambit Weekly story about protest at UNO

UNO students and faculty protest budget cuts

This is a Gambit Weekly article about the recent protest at UNO against the budget cuts. There is video, too!

Banner Hangs against the cuts. Protest Jindal tomorrow!

Some students dropped a banner to oppose the immediately effective cuts that could harm our education and make our state fall further behind as an educational leader. We oppose the possible faculty furloughs and pay cuts, we oppose the possible closure of the university on certain days to save money at the very time we should be expanding higher education if we have any hope of economic development in the future, and we oppose Bobby Jindal's plans for further cuts in the future, while at the same time allowing the LSU system top administrators to take home the state's highest salaries. Cut from the bloated and over-paid administration, not from the people who directly are providing the education our state needs to be competitive in the future.

Tomorrow, Friday, 4/9/10 there will be a protest march/second line downtown at 5:30pm against Bobby Jindal and the GOP while they are in town having a convention. the Save UNO group will be there, you should, too!
More Information

UNO Prepares to Fight Back

The awesome folks at Students for Social Justice have added some important content about the cuts to their blog, check it out.

Their is also a plan for a UNO Jazz Funeral protest:

UNO Jazz Funeral and Rally/Protest

Our education system is dying! Fight for it!

Time:12:00PM Tuesday, March 23rd

Location:UNO Quad
For questions, email bajones1@uno.edu

The folks at LSU appear to be getting ready for March 4th.
What will happen at UNO? It's up to you to take action.
Check out the kids in CA, they are already starting to get wild! We can learn a lot from them!

LSU students have a website up for March 4th.
http://lsustrike.wordpress.com/

Yay!

Save UNO facebook group

If you want to join a facebook group one has been set up: Save UNO
Their is lots of great information posted there by concerned people regarding the cuts and the resistance to it.
LSU also has one: Save LSU

The Driftwood also continues it's great weekly coverage of the cuts. You can write them a letter saying thanks and to keep it up on their webpage.

March 4th is the next International Day of Action to Save Higher Education. Let's make UNO a part of it!

Liberal Arts and Milneburg Hall

Both the Liberal Arts building and Milneburg Hall are now being forced to close at 6pm every day. That means that faculty and staff have to be out and can't get their work done in their offices that they need to do. It means that if a student wants to meet after 6pm with a teacher for office hours, they can't.
They also fired all the night janitors, which is why the building is dirtier.

These budget cuts are effecting all of us: workers, instructors, and students. We need to organize together to stop them.

Perhaps a sit-in or study-in at these buildings to keep them open late than 6pm is in order?
That is how they responded when the administration cut library hours in CA, and it was very successful.

LSU Protests in Baton Rouge

The latest round of college budget cuts, combined with threats of still more to come, provoked protest Tuesday from Louisiana State University faculty and students and a burgeoning movement that promised more organized opposition when negotiations on next year's budget begin.

The gathering of about 150 professors, instructors and students was billed as a "memorial service" to lament cuts in state funding that the protestors called devastating to the campus. They picked a location sure to attract attention: across the street from a celebration event for LSU's 150th anniversary.

"We suffered from some cuts last year, but this year's cuts are really going to decimate the curriculum," said Helen A. Regis, an associate professor in the Department of Geography and Anthropology.

The campus' annual budget was cut by nearly $13 million this month, as agencies across state government lost money in budget reductions ordered by Gov. Bobby Jindal to close a midyear deficit. That comes on top of a reduction in state funding earlier this year.

Continue Reading: Full Article

New Quartersheet Flyer For Organizing

Print out this 2-sided flyer and pass it out for organizing.
Print the PDF from here:
Fight The Budget Cuts

The Driftwood Weighs In

This is what the budget cuts look like

Cuts to the women's studies program









Dorms that have not been repaired since Katrina







The closing of Bienville Hall, one of UNO's largest buildings



















No more paper for you!

Posters and DIY Guides For Fighting The Cuts

Here are 2 new posters that people can print out and put up around campus:
We Are The University
We Know They Don't Care

Here are instructions on how to hang a banner:
Banner Hangs from Recipes For Disaster by CrimethInc.
(this link is to an e-book with other good how-to guides)

Get going!

Banner Hung at UNO

re-post from NOLA Indymedia:

Students are being forced to pay more for less. Government bureaucrats have slashed the higher education budget for the second straight year. And the cuts are only getting worse. Our tuition has ratcheted up 10% and the Post-Secondary Education Review Commission is discussing as much as a 30% increase next Fall. They have already cut classes and majors, jammed every class to bursting, layed off whole crews of UNO workers, and restricted access to labs and buildings. Dirt is piling up in the buildings and students are watching the classes they need to graduate evaporate.

The economic crisis has come home. This is a crisis created by policymakers in bed with Wall Street, not by the students, faculty, or workers at UNO, and WE WON'T PAY FOR THEIR CRISIS.

De-funding higher education is a sure way to keep Louisiana at the bottom of the heap and destroy any hope of a better future for our state.

This situation is untenable.

We urge faculty to discuss the budget cuts in their classes, the staff to organize strikes as the layoffs continue, and for students to take action against tuition increases and class cuts. Faculty, workers, students: stand together and halt the looting of public higher education in Louisiana!

20 of the 25 highest paid government employees in Louisiana are Louisiana university administrators. LSU System President John Lombardi makes $600,000 a year. What Lombardi hopes for is our silence as he dismantles the university with one hand and stuffs his pocket with the other. That is business as usual, for now, but it rests on our complacency in allowing it to function in this time of crisis.

We are the university, we can shut it down.
-A few fed up UNO students

Response: Asked about the banner, some students were excited to see something happening in regards to the budget cuts everyone is talking about on campus, while some, also against the budget cuts, thought it "didn't do anything." We will continue to experiment with tactics, and to find tactics that people feel like will actually have the possibility of "doing something." To be ignored is degrading. We realize that to attempt to get those in power to listen after having already been ignored is simply humiliating, and we don't intend to humiliate ourselves by begging those in power to stop the cuts. We will instead take back and create the kind of university we want to see. That is our goal. We get the message, Power has ignored us. So we see an end to their control over our university as the only real, lasting solution.

Solidarity to the students in struggle in California and around the world.

budget cuts at UNO

We are facing huge budget cuts at UNO, and have been suffering through them for the last 2 years now. We had barely gotten on our feet after Katrina when the state decided that higher education wasn't an important part of making Louisiana a place people would want to call home. We think it is.

Email us your stories of budget-induced hardship at UNO and around the state, so we can compile a better picture of exactly how they are dismantling our universities.

In the middle of a recession, when more people need to go to college to learn the skills they need to adapt to the changing US economy, Jindal and the Board of Regents think it's a good idea to cut programs and raise tuition!

The very same problems we face are also being faced around the U.S., and California students are leading the way in fighting to defend public education. Links to some of their organizations and writings that are relevant to our situation can be found in the sidebar.

UNO is a diverse campus in a diverse city, and proud of it. This article about how California's budget cuts have hit students of color the hardest, applies in exactly the same way to our situation here: The Neoliberalization of Higher Education: What's Race Got To Do With It?

The budget cuts are hurting everyone, and they have disproportionate impacts on vulnerable communities, which we have seen in the attempt to close LSU Press, which focuses on African-American culture, and in cuts to ethnic and womens studies programs. A proposal for so-called "performance based funding" for higher education, just as with Bush's "No Child Left Behind" will lead to an increase in funds going to richer, whiter schools and students. An article explaining the racialized impact on the Southern University system is here: Black College Advocate Questions Funding Formula for Southern University Campuses

UNO Chancellor Ryan was very excited to see UNO's bond rating improve from Baa1 to A3, which makes it easier to attract investors to fund construction projects at UNO. Is Ryan leveraging students' tuition to win a better bond rating like they are doing in California? Is he excited to get investors to build another brand new business building to house his precious MBA program (which by the way has a fee structure that is unfair to the rest of UNO students)? Or perhaps a new addition to the fitness center? Or will Ryan opt to put more funding into researchers' infrastructure, as Jindal suggests, which pushes UNO further along in the national trend of universities becoming capitalist research company, underwritten with student tuition and subsidized by taxpayers? In California, they see these bond schemes as creating an incentive structure for investing in projects that attract wealthier students who can pay higher tuition, which in turn can guarantee more bonds. Thus, the university further comes to be a site of privatization and exclusion rather than inclusion for non-wealthy students and non-profitable majors. For a good critique of the bond system and capital improvement projects, see: No Capital Projects But The End Of Capital

The PSERC has recommended that LA university tuition be raised to the median level for the Southeast (SBER) region. This would mean a 30% tuition increase for UNO. After that, "only" a 5% raise each year should be imposed. The document states that schools must meet retention standards to be "allowed" to raise tuition, showing, along with Ryan's giddy pronouncement on our new bond rating, which side the administration at the university level is really on. They want to raise tuition. They want to run the university like a business and not a public service.

Raising salary levels to the average of other comparable systems is the excuse the administrators use to justify their $600,000 salaries, as well. This very same rationale is trotted out by CEOs of Wall Street firms who make millions each year. Is this a negotiating tactic they teach in graduate business programs? The faulty logic in this is striking. If everyone raises their salaries (or OUR tuition) to the average, it means the average will go up, creating an endless, spiraling justification for ever-increasing salaries in the case of administrators, and ever-increasing tuition, in the case of students. When will someone call this out as the hollow excuse for transferring wealth to the rich that it is?

You can look up any state employee's salary, including the insanely over-paid administrators like John Lombardi (who makes $601,000 a year!), using the tool on the sidebar under "Resources" called State Employee Salary Search.

This article is a good overview of the attack on higher education nationwide: Budget Cuts Take Toll on Education

Stay tuned for fliers, articles, pamphlets, posters, events, and more in the coming week.