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Cuts in higher education

University Of New Mexico Students March To Demand Accountability

This past Wednesday, over 100 UNM students, faculty, staff, and community members came together in protest to demand accountability from President Bob Frank and UNM. The Peaceful Demonstration and Press Conference was called for by the newly formed coalition of students and faculty OurUNM. According to organizers, the coalition was born in response to student’s frustrations about the lack of transparency around decision-making, the lack of inclusion of students in important decisions, and the ever-increasing cost of tuition. According to one of the organizers, Manuel Lopez, the three central issues the coalition has are: communication with students, accountability for past actions, and involvement of the student body. The event started with a press conference at the UNM bookstore on Central Avenue where undergraduate and graduate students shared their experiences being slighted by the administration, the issues they had, and the changes they would like to see implemented on campus.

Austerity Is Crap: A Brief History of the ‘#USM Future’ Protest Movement

For this round of cuts and consolidations, a solidarity between students and faculty had been well established, and grew and flourished under the recognition that we had shared goals in preserving the University of Maine System, not only for their jobs, or for our quality of education, but for the broader benefit of society that a liberal arts education provides, in allowing all working class people to lift themselves up into an intellectual realm that had until only recently in human history been reserved for priests and nobility. A vote of no confidence was issued forth from the Faculty Senate, and Selma Botman resigned, only to be replaced by President Theo Kalikow, who has continued forth advancing the austerity agenda on the University of Southern Maine. Selma Botman, while vacating the seat of the President, was allowed by administrators to continued to draw her salary for the duration of her term, and was in fact hired back as a consultant, and paid an additional $300,000 to write a paper, putting her annual earnings well into the realm of the top 1%. As though to thumb their noses at the student protestors, Administrators gave themselves a raise of $20,000 and upwards.

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