Rising tuition and shrinking academic programs were among the chief complaints for hundreds of students who walked out of classes and demonstrated on campuses and in city plazas across the nation on Wednesday. The rallies, some of which were coordinated through social-media sites like Facebook and Twitter, were inspired by the Occupy Wall Street demonstrators in Lower Manhattan, as well as by the Arab Spring uprisings in the Mideast.
In all, students on nearly 100 campuses participated in the walkouts and rallies, organizers said. Some participants in the student rallies expressed solidarity with the Wall Street demonstrations against financial inequities, while others acknowledged that the goals of the Manhattan protests were not entirely clear to them. But the students did seem keenly aware of how financial pressures were affecting their campuses and their own futures.
Students are worried, Allison Wade, a Spanish major at Indiana University-Purdue University at Fort Wayne who organized a campus rally there, told a local news station. “I have amassed $20,000 so far in debt, and I feel that’s unacceptable,” she said. “Many students are not certain that they’re going to get jobs, and that’s why we’re here.”
Many of the largest student walkouts and rallies were in the Northeast, with a throng of students converging on the administration building of the State University of New York at Albany. About 230 of the students eventually were allowed inside to meet with the university’s president, George M. Philip, to air their concerns over tuition and other issues, the Associated Press reported.
Jackie Hayes, a graduate student in Latin American studies at Albany, told the AP she was there to protest the effects of state budget cuts on higher education. “On our campus, the state budget cuts translated into the elimination of five departments — French, Russian, theater, Italian, and classics,” she said. “We’re concerned about how the next round of cuts will affect academic programs.”
Scores of students also demonstrated at other SUNY campuses, with about 85 students walking out of classes at New Paltz, an organizer told the AP, and according to a participant’s posting on the Occupy Colleges page on Facebook, more than 300 students walked out at Binghamton. “My main concern is the education system,” Brad Gorfein, a sociology and psychology major at New Paltz, told the AP. “These people will be leading the country someday and I would like a well-educated populace voting,” he said.
In New York City, student groups organized walkouts to coordinate with a larger demonstration in Foley Square, near City Hall, that planned a march to Wall Street. Student organizers included the advocacy group New York Students Rising, a “statewide network of students and campus organizations dedicated to defending public higher education” that was formed in response to budget cuts at SUNY and the City University of New York, as well as students from the New School and Columbia and New York Universities, The Village Voice reported.
In Boston, a group mostly made up of Northeastern University students briefly blocked a city street, The Boston Globe reported. After negotiations with the police, the group pulled back to Dewey Square, the gathering point for a larger protest involving students from other campuses, as well as registered nurses and other protesters.
At the University of California at Berkeley, a small group of students billing itself as a flash mob demonstrated outside Dwinelle Hall to call attention to proposals that they said could increase tuition by as much as 81 percent over the next four years, The Daily Californian reported. “An 81-percent increase equals a lifetime of debt,” Desiree Angelo, a junior and one of the protest’s organizers, said.
