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.