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Collegiate Line The Blue Banner War and recession cause financial hardships North Carolina State University students find their library isn’t open as long as it was in December. At Middle Tennessee State University, a computer center won’t be able to buy the new printers it had wanted. In California, students just found out their tuition may go up 20 percent - about five times the inflation rate - next fall. And in Massachusetts, so many course sections have been eliminated that "it’s become almost impossible to graduate in four years," said Plymouth State College student government President Charles Doherty. The combination of the war in the Persian Gulf and the national economic recession, in short, has caused a massive financial crisis at hundreds of campuses around the country. For students and faculty members, it has meant fewer course sections, hiring freezes, layoffs, midyear tuition hikes, new fees for transportation and computer services, the abolition of intramural sports and less access to their libraries and heciltb clinics. "We’re not trimming fat," mourned Oregon State University spokesman Robert Bruce, "we’re removing marrow from the bone." OSU is not alone. At least 30 states, left by the recession to take in less tax money than they thought they would get, are being forced to cut spending, a National Conference on State Legislatures survey in early January found. Since then, the news has gotten worse. In the budgets they proposed later in January and early February, governors in many states asked state higher education systems to cut spending. In Pennsylvania, Gov. Robert Casey proposed lopping $12.6 million - or 3.5 percent of its total budget - from Pennsylvania State University’s spending. On Feb. 7, Ohio Gov. George Voinovich ordered state-run campuses to cut their spending by 7 percent for the remainder of this fiscal year. For the University of Akron, it means a $3.7 million loss and a hiring freeze. New York Gov. Mario Cuomo Jan. 31 unveiled a 1991-92 budget plan that cuts $891 million from state aid to schools. He also called for annual tuition hikes of $500 for State University of New York (SUNY) and the City University of New York (CUNY) systems. In Arizona, the Joint Legislative Budget Committee proposed a budget that would reduce the University of Arizona’s bank account by 2.2 percent, about $4.5 million. "Higher education is fragile," said Randolph Bromery, interim chancellor of Massachusetts’ state Board of Regents. "It simply cannot sustain these cuts and survive." Bromery, dispirited by having to administer what he feared was the forced "radical restructuring" of the state’s campuses, resigned Feb. 11. Students are similarly disgusted. More than 1,200 students at North Carolina State wrote their state legislators in early February to complain about cuts in library hours, larger classes and a new tuition surcharge. Thanks to budget cuts at Plymouth State, the health center, which once was open 24 hours a day, now is only available to students from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. "Emergencies can’t happen after 5," said Doherty. His classmates already have suffered other cuts. Doherty noted the school eliminated hundreds of course sections to save money during fall semester. Library hours and funding for intramural and club sports were other victims of the budget squeeze. Plymouth State’s tuition, set by the central headquarters, is $350 per semester. Fees, set by the Plymouth administration are now $1,000. While most severe at state-run institutions, the funding crisis also has hit some private campuses. The recession, private-campus money-watchers say, dampens alumni donations and could eventually diminish the income the schools get from their stock portfolios. Yale University President Benno Schmidt, for instance, ordered all departments to trim their budgets by between 5 and 10 percent next year. They’re also to consider long-term cuts in faculty and possibly entire departments, to From the Wire No bare breasts or buttocks at Palm Springs Hoping to help control annual riots and rowdy behavior by visiting collegians during spring break each year, the Palm Springs City Council adopted a series of measures that make it a crime to wear string bikinis, to bare breasts or expose one’s buttocks in public. The ordinances, in effect, will give police the power to arrest and get more rowdy partiers off the streets. Mayor .Sonny Bono called the new rules "courageous" in light of the money that visiting collegians spend annually. Student recants rape allegation An unnamed Ohio Wesleyan University student admitted Feb. 15 that she had lied when she reported she had been raped near campus last fall, local pohee Det. Mark Drum said. The woman, who had made other false crime reports, admitted she had lied after police confronted her with their suspicions that the assault, which was the second of three rape reports. The student will now face campus disciplinary procedures to determine if she committed "a serious breach of our student code of conduct," spokesman Todd Wilson said. Separate false rape reports caused widespread fear at George Washington and Ohio State universities in December and January, and ultimately prompted punishment of the women who made the reports. Paper launches drive for crime reports Hoping to pressure University of Pittsburgh administrators into letting them see reports of crimes committed in and around the urban campus, editors of the Pitt News asked students to sign a petition. Police had given the paper crime reports until Feb. 6, when campus lawyer Richard Holmes stopped the practice, saying it compromised ongoing investigations and threatened to invade the privacy of people mentioned in the report. College Press help offset declining revenues and steadily rising costs. "Yale for many years has been consuming its capital resources to live beyond its means," Schmidt reported in a letter to the university last November. Stanford, Cornell and Columbia universities have instituted major cost-containment programs, while some others, like Georgetown, Northwestern and Washington University in St. Louis, have closed entire departments. "Overall, the impact on students will not be great," maintained Richard Rosser, , head of the National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities, a Washington, D.C.- based group representing private campuses. While student services such as counseling and career services may be trimmed, Rosser said campuses first probably would defer maintenance, which wouldn’t become apparent for some time. "We’re being screwed from both sides," said Dan Labovitz, vice president for research at the American Association of University Students (AAUS), a group representing students at large research universities around the country. Cuts in financial aid have put a greater burden on both students and campuses. At the same time, Labovitz, a student at New York University, a private campus, said the economy is forcing more students to consider transferring to public schools and making it harder for private campuses to collect donations. College Press Service B % Tuition rises 40 percent In what was perhaps the biggest single tuition increase imposed on any students anywhere, the University of California’s Board of Regents voted Feb. 15 to raise in-state "registration fees" by 40 percent. "We are disappointed," said Susan Polan of a statewide student lobbying group that had asked the regents to hold to their previous promise to keep tuition hikes to a maximum 10 percent a year. In a press release, the regents said they felt they had no choice amid drastic cuts in state funding of the nine-campus UC system. Besides raising in-state fees by $650 to $2,274 and out-of-student fees by $1,282 to $9,973, the board also voted to cut 1,000 non-teaching employees from the campuses’ workforce and to delay the building of a new UC campus in the San Joaquin Valley. President refuses to recall ’sexist’ video Northern Michigan University President James B. Appleberry refused to recall an 8-minute promotional videotape that some faculty members claimed was sexist. A 70-second introduction to the video featured dancing teenaged girls wearing form-fitting leotards. While the controversy raised "basic and contextual gender issues" on campus, Appleberry told a Faculty Senate meeting the tape was "very professional." University expels student for yelling insults Brown University officials confirmed Feb. 12 they had expelled a student for drunkenly shouting insults at black, Jewish and homosexual students during his birthday "celebration" on campus Oct. 18. The student, identified by a local paper as football player Douglas Hann, reportedly had been disciplined once before for calling a black student at a party a "nigger." Service Women reveal names of alleged rapists Sensational bathroom-wall lists of men accused of crimes against women have not reappeared since winter break, observers at the two schools galvanized by the lists last term report. But at least one therapist predicts women at other campuses may start similar lists in the future. "1 think that as publicity about this gels out, women at other campuses may try it," said Valerie Mantecon, a licensed therapist specializing in marriage and family issues in Costa mesa, Calif. In November, students at Brown University in Rhode Island discovered the names of up to 30 men, grouped under a heading of men who committed rape, had been written - apparently by their victims - on the wall of a campus bathroom. As soon as custodians erased the names, someone returned to write them on the wall again. In December, a group calling itself the Women’s Army posted a similar list on the wall of a library bathroom at the University of Pennsylvania. No one at either university has been caught. The lists, of course, sparked frantic debated about the number of unreported rapes that may be committed at colleges and about the fairness of ruining someone’s reputation by simply writing his name - perhaps without cause - on a wall. Officials at both schools complained that, because the lists’ authors remained anonymous, the schools could not take action against them or the accused men. However, the authors may have been seeking something besides revenge, Mantecon speculated. "They may have been trying to say ’I’m not going to be ignored,’" Mantecon said. "It may have helped their sense of security." It did alert Brown administrators to a lot of insecurity, fear and anger among some of their female students. In response, they appointed an ombudswoman to represent women in the university community and a coordinator to represent women’s concerns within the administration, reported Mark Nickel, director of Brown’s news ser\ices. The lists stopped appearing at Brown as soon as the school went on winter break. Nickel said. After housekeepers removed it, the list at Penn did not return. College Press Service Efforts continue to establish abortion clinic on campus The leader of a failed effort to establish the first on-campus abortion clinic in the U.S. says he’ll soon move his efforts to other schools around the U.S. Organizer Andy Ternay, past president of the Progressive Students’ Union, has vowed to take the issue elsewhere. "Making it a more national issue will draw a more powerful group behind us," Ternay said. Ternay helped organize an effort earlier this school year to establish an abortion clinic on the University of Texas at Arlington campus. UTA students rejected the effort, voting 1,430 to 746 against allowing first-trimester abortions in the student health clinic on the campus. a week later, the Student congress voted down a resolution to send the proposal to the school administration, which had promised to reject it anyway. In elections, students on other campuses often have opposed letting women have the option of abortion, much less having a clinic on campus. At Virginia Tech, for example, students voted down a student government resolution that opposed further restrictions on abortion. Despite winning the few campus wide student abortion elections that have been held, anti-abortion activists complain student governments are biased against them. "Too many student governments think they can impost their morality on the rest of the campus,’ said Scott Obernberger, head of American Collegians for Life. Obernberger, who knows of about 300 campuses with pro-life groups. Pro-choice groups, he maintained, get funding "without question." On the other hand, pro life groups are at "the very least interrogated." "Student governments around the country are notoriously unfair." College Press Service
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