Budget Cuts: The New Campus Issue

"Listen to me, Mr. Legislature

man,

I know you're no fool. If you go and cut the budget to

ribbons, We'll all have to drop out of school."

So went the chant as University of Massachusetts students demonstrated last week outside the statehouse to protest against projected budget cuts and higher costs. Their sentiment was echoed on several other campuses--including Brandeis, where dissidents occupied the sociology building. Following closely the picketing and the takeover of the administration building at Brown University (TIME, May 5), the protests seemed to establish budget cuts as the major campus issue this spring.

Costs Increase. The protest at U. Mass, began after Governor Michael Dukakis announced plans to cut $11.8 million from the budget of $118 million requested by the university administration. U. Mass, also announced a room-and-board increase of $75 a year, to $1,375. In a series of meetings, U. Mass, students drew up a platform calling for no increase in tuition and fees, no reductions in faculty or enrollment and "full and equal" participation in some university decisions. How the university could meet student demands and still survive financially--in a time of inflated costs, dwindling Government support, less income from gifts and lower values of stock holdings--the students could not say. Still, said one U. Mass, senior, "there are alternatives, and we're mandating the Governor to find them."

After an unproductive meeting with the administration, the students called a two-day moratorium on classes last week. The first day, about 70% of the university's 22,350 students stayed away from their classes--many of them attending some 40 workshops ranging from "Higher Education and the Current Crisis" to "Lobbying Tactics: On Meeting and Talking with Legislators."

Next day about 1,000 U. Mass students trekked from the main campus in Amherst to Boston for a demonstration on the Common across from the Statehouse. Randolph Bromery, chancellor of the Amherst campus, sympathized with the students: "These young people are feeling what their parents are feeling: the economic crunch."

At Brandeis in nearby Waltham, meanwhile, a multiracial group of about 30 students took over Pearlman Hall, the sociology building, and held it despite an injunction ordering them out. They demanded that the university drop plans to cut back its Transitional Year Program (which helps train many poorly prepared minority students for undergraduate work), to reduce financial aid and dismiss some faculty. Brandeis, which has a projected budget of $32.8 million for next year, is suffering from inflated costs and the recession; this year its income from gifts is $3 million below projections. If the cuts go through, the students said, Brandeis would "become even richer and whiter," by saving money now spent on programs for black students and by recruiting fewer blacks. It is no accident that the words and tactics of the Brandeis students were similar to those of the dissidents at Brown University; some of the Brandeis students had driven to Providence to take notes on the protest there.

While most Brandeis undergraduates had mixed feelings about the takeover, Administration Spokesman Jeff Osoff declared that "we won't accede to demands that would amount to $1.5 million over a balanced budget. We have no intention to negotiate with anyone who is holding a building."

As the budget protests spread to Manhattan, several hundred Hunter College students occupied the office of the dean of students, and some 900 City University of New York students demonstrated against Mayor Abraham Beame's plans to cut $69.7 million from the school's $702 million budget proposed for next year. At week's end, a dozen Harvard students, reflecting the mood of minority students on other campuses, began a sit-in at the administration building to protest the university's failure to set up a long-promised black cultural center.

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