Florida State University will layoff as many as 200 faculty and staff members, including 25 tenured professors.
 
The layoffs are part of $56.6 million that will be cut from FSU by June by the Board of Trustees and the Florida State Budget Crisis Committee.

Other schools have made similar cuts, but to a smaller extent. The University of Florida has reportedly let go 20 faculty members. The University of Central Florida has left vacant positions unfilled and drawn on savings as an alternative to cutting further programs and job positions.
 
The faculty union is calling these layoffs a breach of contract, and is considering legal action.

“Across the whole State University System, everyone was faced with the same budget cutbacks,” said Philip Froelich, a tenured professor of oceanography. “Yet FSU is the only one to fire more than just one or two tenured faculty, so there’s something really wrong with how it was done here.”
 
Froelich is one of the five faculty members in his department to receive a layoff notice. He was shocked to learn that three of the five faculty members were tenure-track professors.
 
“Something’s really wrong when you bring in highly recruited junior faculty on a tenure-track line and the unwritten rule is they’ve got six years to prove themselves to make tenure, but then you fire them six months later,” Froelich said.
 
Other departments such as the English department have lost a number of full-time teaching positions. Consequently, class sizes are expanding and faculty morale is low.

Eric Walker, president of the Faculty Senate and assistant professor of English, said he repeatedly warned the Board of Trustees that laying off so many tenured faculty members was unprecedented and would attract negative attention nationally and internationally.
 
Froelich added that the layoffs have “torn the fabric of the faculty,” will compromise students’ education, and breed mistrust. According to Austin Todd, a graduate research assistant in oceanography, many learned about the school's cost-cutting measures from the local newspaper before the administration.
 
The administration has even resorted to merging departments. Geology, oceanography, and anthropology will be combined into an Earth and Atmospheric Sciences unit. Todd said that students are now worried about the reputability of their respective departments and its effect on their degrees.
 
However, Assistant English Professor Ned Stuckey-French believes there is hope. He said that students, administrators, faculty, staff, and alumni must work together to pressure the Governor and Florida Legislature to do what is right, and defend higher education.

More from the FSU News at FSU

In an effort to count more college students in the census and boost funding for higher education, many colleges and universities are urging their students to fill out census forms.

Census data is used to help determine levels of federal funding to be distributed around the country. Census responses influence policies ranging from how many congressional representatives a state has, to the amount of federal funding states allocate for higher education.

Results of the student count could have a dramatic impact given the massive funding cuts to higher education wracking the nation’s colleges and universities and the financial aid reform bill pending in the Senate,

At some schools around the country, resident assistants in dorms have taken the lead in getting their residents to fill out the forms. Other schools have provided on-campus drop boxes for completed forms. The boxes are supposed to help students remember to fill out their forms, and make it easier for them to turn in completed ones.

A group of communications majors at the University of Maryland designed an extensive campaign to get students to fill out the forms. The group worked with the UMD student government to set up tables in the student union to raise awareness about the census. They also urged local landlords to send out mass emails to their tenants, urging them to participate.

“A lot of students don’t know, but answers from the census help allocate $400 billion of public funding to public institutions, such as hospitals and schools…based on how many people live in an area,” said Sammi Liang, a senior American studies and communication major at UMD. Liang was interviewed by the UMD student newspaper, the Diamondback.

Census officials said that college students are frequently a difficult demographic to track because many do not fill out census information. According to the officials, students often assume that their parents are supposed to handle it, or that they have to be a homeowner or permanent resident to be included in the count. Some people also have privacy concerns, although by law the Census Bureau must keep all collected information secret, even from other government agencies.

The administration at Johns Hopkins University is supporting a campus-wide push to get students to fill out the forms. The student newspaper at Johns Hopkins, the JHU Gazette, looked into how the census will work on their campus, and what the administration is doing to push it forward.

The census contains 10 questions concerning a “person’s name, sex, age, date of birth, race and origin,” according to Census officials interviewed by the student newspaper the JHU Gazette. The officials say the form should take no more than 10 minutes to complete.

“We take the census count very seriously, so we ask that when students receive these forms, they fill them out and get them returned promptly,” said Susan Boswell, dean of student life at the Homewood campus.

Robert M. Groves, the U.S. Census Bureau director, wrote on his blog that college students are responsible for filling out census information because they are considered to be residents of the towns or cities where they go to school.
 
Off-campus students will receive census questionnaires in the mail sometime this month, while on-campus students at Johns Hopkins will receive questionnaires in April or May, according to the JHU Gazette. Those dates will vary on different campuses around the country.

Census guidelines consider each address a household. Housemates living at the same address only fill out one census form.

More from the JHU Gazette at Johns Hopkins University
More from the Diamondback at the University of Maryland

Students at Whitman College in Washington are using personal appeals to try to persuade state officials not to cut their financial aid.
 
Whitman junior Kate Pringle conducted a series of two-minute interviews with 11 students, in which they argued for their student aid funding to be restored. The interviews were part of a larger effort by the Independent Colleges of Washington to raise awareness about threats to financial aid funding.

Both the House and the Senate in Washington passed individual budgets on Feb. 23 restoring all funding to the Need Grant, Washington Scholars, and WAVE Programs. Both budgets, however, proposed to reduce funding for the State Work Study program by 30 percent, translating to an estimated $70,000 loss for Whitman students.

According to the College Data website, a year at Whitman costs $47,600, and over half of the student body applied for financial aid last year. The average student graduated from Whitman with nearly $17,000 of debt.

Pringle thinks putting students’ faces in front of lawmakers is a way to humanize the issue.

“The video project is an effort to put real people and their stories into the discussion about student aid so that the aid programs aren’t just treated as cold numbers on a spreadsheet,” said Greg Scheiderer, vice president of the Independent Colleges of Washington.

Chadd Bennett, ICW director of research and publications, said he is planning on featuring the video series on YouTube and on the ICW's Facebook and Web pages.
 
Earlier this year, Governor Christine Gregoire proposed to suspend a number of financial aid programs available to Washington state college students in an effort to balance the state's $2.6 billion budget.
 
Pringle, who works in Whitman's Office of Financial Aid, said the interviews could be more effective than students' written requests for aid.
 
"It's one thing for us to send a letter or for someone to quote statistics about how many students rely upon financial aid, but it's an entirely different experience to see a real student telling their story and expressing how much they need the aid," she said. "I only benefit from some of the programs that were in danger, but I know how many students really are affected by all of them due to my job, so it really made me anxious and a little outraged that the state would consider taking those programs away."
 
Whitman junior McKenna Milici, and her sister, sophomore Rhya, were among those interviewed on camera.
 
"Obviously, the idea that the state is cutting our program now will have a huge impact on my family since there are two of us trying to go here," McKenna Milici said. "I'm not quite sure if our video will be seen by legislators, but we hope...to stress not only how this is affecting students, but to provide a tangible image for how this is affecting families."


More from the Pioneer at Whitman College
More from College Data

By Leah Pine

From lobbying to lying down, thousands of students across the country last week used tactics new and old to take legislators to task on funding for higher education. Organizing under the banner of an official National Day of Action, students held walk-outs, teach-ins, rallies, and demonstrations. The day marked the first hint at the power and number of angry and cash-strapped students on a national scale.

By the end of the day, hundreds of students across the country were handcuffed, the main UC Santa Cruz campus was shut down, and a major highway in Oakland had been blocked with shouting protesters.

Angus Johnston, author of the Student Activism blog, compiled a Google Map of 124 actions planned for March 4th, the largest chunk of them in the Western part of the country. Public protests made up the most visible face of the day’s events.

California was the epicenter of the protests, riding on a wave of momentum that began this past September 24th, when faculty and students organized over 7,000 people to walk out of their classrooms and gather in public quads on the different campuses of the University of California.

Johnston, who wrote his doctoral thesis about student activism, offered his analysis of why the Golden State had the biggest events.

“In part that’s a reflection of the depth of the crisis facing California higher education right now, but it’s also a reflection of the head start that California’s campus organizers have compared to the rest of the country,” he wrote. “Almost every campus reporting huge demonstrations today has seen multiple rallies and protests over the last few months.”

Indeed, the rallies and protests in California have carried momentum since September. And though at times peaceful pickets lapsed into violence or destruction of property, they did help students get something they were looking for.

In his State of the State Address in January, California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger pledged to renew California’s financial commitment to higher education. One of his aids cited the size and ferocity of student protests in Schwarzenegger’s decision.

But Thursday, students went beyond civil disobedience and embarked on civic participation to voice the pain of rising tuition.

For months, disparate student governments and other student groups around the country have been running individual letter-writing campaigns or lobby days at their state capitols. Especially in the University of California system, multiple groups of students have channeled their anger towards the state capitol, showing up in suits, writing letters, making phone calls, and working with UC administrators to garner allies and political power.

And while last week’s events featured more on-campus rallies than anything else, fresh thousands set their sights anew on their state capitols, a hint that lobbying and political organizing might be the next wave of what Johnston is now calling a movement.

Thousands from Denver, to Montgomery, to Tallahassee descended on lawmakers en masse, with megaphones outside and button-up shirts inside. Some organized through their state student associations, others through their student governments, still others through local labor unions, and some just worked off the cuff.

Since last semester, there have been two distinct messages students have taken to their state capitols. The first is a profile of the struggles of studenthood—students telling legislators their personal stories about the number of loans and jobs they have to take on, and the difficulty of focusing on schoolwork while juggling nearly full time jobs.

But recently, students have been arguing their point with a focus on producing an educated workforce for their home state.

“The bigger picture is to diversify Florida's economy,'' said Nick Autiello last week to the Miami Herald. Autiello is a 19-year-old sophomore at Florida International University. “The quality of the programs are going to suffer; the best brains are going to leave.''

A student lobby day in Sacramento last Monday earned few firm commitments from legislators, and many students on March 4th reported a similar impasse. Legislators are citing multi-billion dollar deficits in their state budgets—the state of Arizona is nearly bankrupt—and many view higher education as just another one of many public services that are being reduced.

Colorado State Senator Bruce Whitehead told students that the only solution to Colorado public universities’ budget crisis is a tuition hike, a song many legislators are singing.

Many students ran their events Thursday as kick-offs for future campaigns, but few of the organized events or lobbying efforts touted student voting power as a means for getting what they want from lawmakers.

The vast majority of yesterday’s lobbying actions addressed state-level decision makers.

Lobbying or not, students acting yesterday worked under a common theme, one that UCLA protesters shouted to the rooftops of Murphy Hall.

“Education should be free—no cuts, no fees!”


More from Student Activism’s Google Map of actions

Racially-charged incidents at the University of California San Diego have led administrators and the Black Student Union to team up in setting new school diversity goals.

The agreement, signed by the two groups Thursday, details new initiatives designed to combat the recent hate incidents on campus and provide new avenues for tolerance.

The University will diversify the student body by increasing the number of students of color, according to a joint statement issued faculty, students, and administrators involved in the talks. The University will use targeted outreach to get more students of color.

Black students currently make up 1.6 percent of the student body.

Administrators will also re-write the student code of conduct, and provide more classes and instructors dedicated to diversity issues.

The statement said the discussion covered many topics and generated good ideas.

The progress comes in response to the tumultuous past month at UCSD, when the student body grappled with what many called a racist off-campus party, found a noose in the library and a KKK hood on a University statue.

The Black Student Union issued a list of 32 demands of the administration shortly after the party, several of which were granted on the spot, and more which were just granted in the recent conferences.

More from the San Jose Mercury News

Recent protesters at the University of Washington will be happy to hear that although scholarships around the country have been stung by a bad economy, the Husky Pride Fund at UW recently hit its fundraising goal of $50,000. The fund is student-raised and student-controlled.

Students will use the money raised for need-based scholarships. The fund’s creators set the $50,000 goal during the 2006-2007 school year.

“I knew eventually that it was going to become a good source of scholarship for those who really need it and those in emergency situations,” said Mike Snowden, founder and vice chair of the fund. “I knew it would take time, but I really wanted to create a sustainable infrastructure that students need.”
The Fund, which was created by UW's student government, began the year with $22,000. Group members raise money primarily through change jars located around campus and by selling "Husky Tees," a student-designed T-shirt celebrating the University.

The students behind the Fund showed that quality long-range planning, something that often escapes student governments, can be a powerful and lucrative tool.

Although no money has been awarded yet, the Fund's members are in discussions with University administrators to determine effective models for scholarship distribution. 

“We considered the scholarship allocation at the beginning of the fund’s development as an unnecessary stress and wanted to hit the mark first,” Snowden said.

Once it begins distributing money, the fund will become the only scholarship on campus not controlled by the administration. This means it will be untouched by the recent funding cuts that have recently taken a toll on colleges and universities across the country.


More from the Daily at the University of Washington
More from the Husky Pride Fund