Massachusetts Daily Collegian

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A free and responsible press serving the UMass community since 1890

Massachusetts Daily Collegian

A free and responsible press serving the UMass community since 1890

Massachusetts Daily Collegian

Students take action on March 4 to defend education

Thursday saw large scale protests as students at the University of Massachusetts participated in the March 4 National Day of Action to Defend Education.

Students met Thursday at 11 a.m. in the Student Union and planned out their demonstration.

The protest kicked off at noon from the Student Union and saw a brigade of students marching to the Whitmore Administration Building. Once at Whitmore, students and community members took to the podium, voicing concerns about the fate of public higher education and espousing their views that public higher education should be free.

Upon the conclusion of the speeches, students poured into Whitmore and up to the second floor, while delegates from the group protesting, the UMass Coalition for the March 4th Day of Action to Defend Higher Education, moved up to the third floor to read a list of their demands to Chancellor Robert Holub.

The Coalition’s demands included stopping the rising cost of public higher education, specifically in Massachusetts, preventing fee proposals such as the proposed Commonwealth College and Flagship University fees, and standing in solidarity with students of the University of California system, who have been protesting proposed fee hikes at their universities.

-Collegian News Staff

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  • J

    JoshSep 21, 2010 at 3:21 pm

    So you’re saying that we should let the corporations hold us hostage to their demands, and we should not do anything that might upset them, lest we incur their wrath?

    To hell with that. Corporate taxes are already lower in the US than anywhere else in the industrialized world, and they are lower than at any other point since WW2. It’s time to tell the rich to stop whining and start sharing the burden with the rest of us.

    Reply
  • F

    FrankMar 7, 2010 at 2:04 am

    One of the “Demands” is dramatically raising corporate tax rates to fun free education from pre-school through graduate school. Only problem is, when that drives those corporations out of business or out of the country, who’s going to hire these graduates with their freebie educations??

    Another vivid example of the lunacy of the liberal, Progressive left and their irrational belief in a Utopian world….the same one envisioned by Stalin, Mao, Castro and so many other failed social experiments. It’s an idiotic fantasy, only a miseducated individual could embrace.

    Reply
  • T

    Turd_FurgesonMar 6, 2010 at 2:40 pm

    This isnt changing the fact that the taxes that are paying for the subsidies that are being cut dont exist anymore, and that the costs that were being redistributed are simply being redistributed from other people back to the students who were spending the money in the first place. If you want to lower the cost of education, cut services, cut the quality of the education or hire instructors who will spend more time teaching classes (they may teach 5-6 hours in class each week, and maybe 10 more grading or preparing if they havent already prepared from previous years) and not doing research.

    These actions arent defending education. There isnt oppression here. There is only a sense of the entitlement mentality and self absorption that defines higher education so distinctively.

    Reply
  • A

    anonMar 5, 2010 at 11:26 pm

    there’s a follow up meeting tuesday at 5 in the basement of the campus center, 169c i think

    Reply